Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-09-04-Speech-4-221"
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"en.20080904.23.4-221"2
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"Mr President, a fellow Member on the left of the House has just used the tragic issue of the death penalty in Iran and the dreadful crimes being committed there as a pretext to launch an assault on religion per se. He has attributed these actions to the religious nature of the regime. In my view, that is absurd.
This is a perfectly ordinary totalitarian regime which simply exploits Islam for its own ends. That is the problem, and we must vigorously condemn the regime itself, not Islam or religion per se.
Incidentally, the most heinous regimes in the world's history were those which invoked National or International Socialism, as China continues to do today.
We should therefore be clear on one point: this House is not the place for ideological disputes, even on the issue of Iran. It is not about ideology; it is about the universality of human rights. This universality of human rights transcends ideological differences. There are no Asian human rights, and there are no Islamic human rights which give people less security and might condone the death penalty in one form or another. We are radically opposed to the death penalty, whether it is practised in the US, China, or Iran, but we do not view these countries as the same. We must be very clear about one thing: the Iranian regime is a totalitarian regime, and we would like to see it come to an end."@en1
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