By: Lord Maginnis of Drumglass
ePolitix.com,  08 February 2010

Lord Maginnis of Drumglass writes for ePolitix.com about what steps the government has taken to defend the human rights of Iranian refugees at Camp Ashraf.

Having spent much of my 27 years in Parliament on Northern Ireland issues and having been one of the frontline negotiators in the lead-up to the Belfast Agreement, I should no longer be surprised at the deviousness of this government. Just this week we’ve had the secretary of state for Northern Ireland proclaim and sanction a new ’Agreement’ at Hillsborough Castle that is not an agreement, has no admitted ownership and that opens up an administrative nightmare that has no recognisable structure.

While that’s bad enough, one is hopeful that no one will die; no one will be tortured and no one will become a refugee as a result. It is not so in the Middle East where our bungling government helps exacerbate the suffering of those who are victims of the vilest regimes that one can imagine – where enforcement, including executions, is done in the name of religion.

Our invasion of Iraq, for what now appears to have been the most dubious of reasons, has cost us dearly in terms of the lives of our young soldiers – but what is more dishonorable is the manner in which government blatantly turns a ’blind eye’ to the plight of almost 4,000 Iranian refugees in Camp Ashraf.

The Ashraf residents, members of the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI) who have fled the mullahs, have been effectively recognised as refugees in Iraq and under Iraqi law for the past two decades. Their effective acceptance as refugees in response to their persecution in Iran and continuing inability to return there conforms with Iraqi domestic law, the new Iraqi Constitution of 2005 and with the requirements of general international law.

Now, the UK and US forces have withdrawn, deeming them without – nay, even denying that they have – rights under the Fourth Geneva Convention. To be precise, the UK government stated (16 Dec Col WA247): ’The government view is that, with the formal end of hostilities in Iraq and the transfer of responsibility for the camp to the Iraqi authorities, any claim to protected person status has ceased to apply. This is a view also shared by the US.’

Hence, unshackled, troops of the Nouri Al Maliki regime, under pressure from Iran, was virtually given carte blanche to raid Ashraf last July, to murder 11 residents, to injure dozens of others and to arrest and torture many more, even though the courts subsequently found them not guilty of trumped up charges. Now they plan to relocate these people to remote areas of Iraq where systematic annihilation can occur.

If our government’s sense of honour is so malleable then it is something the world should know and care about.