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The officials addressed a meeting on “Sanctions: A Key Foreign Policy Tool” held at the department in Washington, DC on March 13.
David Peyman, deputy assistant secretary of state for counter threat finance and sanctions, told audience members that the sanctions imposed on Iran since the US unilaterally withdrew from the Iran nuclear deal—amounting to the largest sanctions package any country has used against another in modern-day history and covering 850 individuals and entities as well as entire sectors of the Iranian economy—were only the beginning.
2.2 Hardline cleric Raisi appointed head of Iran’s judiciary
Hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi has been appointed head of the Islamic Republic’s judiciary by a decree issued by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the semi-official Fars news agency reported on March 7. Raisi was comprehensively defeated by President Hassan Rouhani, a pragmatic and moderate politician, in Iran’s 2017 presidential election in which the incumbent was re-elected. Some analysts suggest that loss and other concerns mean the 58-year-old is not in the running to replace Khamenei as supreme leader. Khamenei turns 80 in July.
Former Iranian attorney general Raisi will replace Sadegh Amoli Larijani, a conservative cleric who is the brother of Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, as head of the judiciary.
Rights activists are heavily critical of Raisi because of his alleged involvement in the 1988 mass execution of prisoners at the end of Iran’s long war with Iraq. After Iran’s then-supreme leader Ruhollah Khomeini accepted a UN-brokered ceasefire, members of the Iranian opposition group Mujahedeen-e-Khalq (MEK), which was heavily armed by Saddam Hussein, surged across the Iranian border in a surprise attack.
Iran thwarted the assault, but the attack led to what were seen as sham retrials of political prisoners, militants and others that would become known as “death commissions”. International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed, but the MEK claims the number was as high as 30,000. Raisi reportedly served on a panel involved in sentencing the prisoners to death.
In 2016, Khamenei appointed Raisi to run the Imam Reza charity foundation. It manages a huge conglomerate of businesses and endowments in Iran. It is one of many bonyads , or charitable foundations, that exist thanks to donations and assets seized after Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
These foundations offer no public accounting of their spending and answer only to Iran’s supreme leader. The Imam Reza charity, known as Astan-e Quds-e Razavi in Farsi, is believed to be one of the biggest in the country. Analysts estimate its worth in the tens of billions of dollars, according to The Associated Press.
6 IRAN Country Report April 2019 www.intellinews.com