UK Politicians Call for Revolutionary Guards to be Classified as Terrorists

Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps has repeatedly supported terrorists and groups that jeopardize the safety of the Middle East and should be added to the United Kingdom’s list of terrorist groups, the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee has found. The group also urges the UK government to take greater action to bring its citizens held hostage in Iran home, stating that they are being used as bargaining chips in political disputes.

Among them are Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, who has been imprisoned in Iran since 2016, and Kameel Ahmady, who has recently been sentenced to eight years in prison after being detained in 2019. Both are being held on trumped-up charges,

In a new report, the 11-member committee, which assesses the policy of the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), sets out that actions taken by Iran’s Revolutionary Guards “meet the criteria for proscription in the Terrorism Act 2000.” If the UK’s foreign and home secretaries follow the committee’s recommendations and re-classify the Guards as a terrorist organization, it will follow steps taken by the United States, which put the Guards on its list of terrorist groups in 2019.

The report outlines these actions have taken place over the decades, pointing to Iran’s proxy wars in the Middle East, its involvement in acts of terrorism in Europe, and the repeated human rights violations carried out against its own citizens.

The report states that the UK government’s approach to British citizens held hostage in Iran needs overhauling, and says the current strategy is “clearly not working.” The committee's reporrt further outlines that the families of such prisoners must be given greater and clearer support.

It calls, too for a replacement for the 2015 nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which it describes as a “shell of an agreement,” due to the US withdrawal from the deal in 2018 and the Iranian parliament’s push to begin producing enriched uranium again, a direct violation of the agreement.

Iran’s ambassador to the UK Hamid Baeidinejad voiced his anger over the report. "We condemn in its strongest term a report issued on developments regarding Iran by a few UK MPs,” he said on Twitter. “This report is not more than advocating regime change through maximum pressure policy against Iran, while the main architect of this failed policy is driven out of the White House.”

The publication, No prosperity without justice: the UK’s relationship with Iran, urges the UK government to develop a strategy for its “long-term, international response” to “Iran’s wider destabilizing activities.”

Charlie Loudon, the International Legal Adviser at REDRESS, a human rights organization that has acted as a legal representative for Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and campaigned for her release since 2016, said the committee had sent “a powerful and timely reminder that the UK government must do everything in its power to secure the release of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and other innocent British nationals arbitrarily detained in Iran."