The European Parliament adopted by 666 votes to 5, with 16 abstentions, a resolution on the case of Ahmadreza Djalali in Iran.
The text adopted in plenary was tabled by the EPP, S&D, Renew, Greens/EFA, ECR and the Left groups.
Swedish-Iranian national Dr Ahmadreza Djalali, who specialises in emergency medicine and is a scholar at Belgium’s Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Italy’s Università del Piemonte Orientale, was arrested on 24 April 2016 by the Iranian security forces. He was sentenced to death on spurious espionage charges in October 2017 following a grossly unfair trial based on a confession extracted under torture.
Parliament deeply regretted the fact that since Parliament’s resolution of 17 December 2020, no EU Member State has managed to visit arbitrarily detained EU nationals, including Dr Ahmadreza Djalali. It reiterated its urgent call on the Vice-President of the Commission / High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (VP/HR) and the EU Member States to do their utmost to prevent Dr Ahmadreza Djalali’s execution.
Moreover, the resolution called on Iran, under its newly elected President Ebrahim Raisi, to halt the imminent execution of Swedish-Iranian academic Dr Ahmadreza Djalali, to pardon and release him immediately and unconditionally, and to allow him to return to his family in Sweden.
Parliament firmly condemned his torture, arbitrary detention and death sentence on unsubstantiated charges.
Pending the above, Iran is urged to
- immediately grant him regular contact with his family and lawyer, to guarantee his safety and provide him with urgent and adequate medical care;
- stop threatening his family in Sweden and Iran.
Parliament also urged Iran to:
- immediately drop all charges against Dr Ahmadreza Djalali, as well as all arbitrarily detained EU nationals;
- release political prisoners, including human rights defenders, as they have been arbitrarily detained solely for exercising their fundamental rights to the freedoms of expression, belief, association, publication, peaceful assembly and media freedom;
- properly investigate the officials responsible for serious human rights violations, including the use of excessive and lethal force on protesters;
- introduce an immediate moratorium on the use of the death penalty as a step towards abolition;
For its part, Parliament called on the Council to consider further targeted sanctions, including freezing the assets of the Iranian regime officials and entities involved in the arbitrary detention and sentencing to death of EU nationals, either using the current EU human rights sanctions regime against Iran or the EU’s global human rights sanctions regime (EU Magnitsky Act).