EU companies run the risk of providing the tools for oppression in Iran

suppression in Iran by Mullahs

The following is an article written by Julie Lenarz  and Benjami Weinthal in the Independent on Sunday, August 30th, 2015. Julie Lenarz is the Executive Director of the London-based Human Security Centre. Benjamin Weinthal is a Berlin-based fellow for the Foundation for Defence of Democracies

The UK along with the other world powers reached agreement last month with Iran to curb elements of its nuclear programme. With the gold rush mentality infecting Germany, Italy, Austria, France and Switzerland to secure billion dollar deals, their investments are far from risk-free and may create an unseemly backlash.
The Faustian bargain - a feeble nuclear deal in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions - has pushed the vision of a free and democratic Iran into a dim distance. Put simply, a sizable chunk of the estimated $150 billion in sanctions relief will be used to repress Iran’s civilian population. One of the greatest beneficiaries is the hard-line Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) with its extensive tentacles in the economic realm wielding control over strategic industries and black market enterprises.
Take the case of Western technology used to execute Iranians. Just last month, the CEO of the Austrian giant crane manufacturer Palfinger described Iran as a “promising market” with great needs, although it has been alleged that at least one Palfinger crane was used in an execution after being resold to Iran.
Iran is currently murdering prisoners at the rate of more than three people per day. 694 executions have been carried out as of mid-July, approaching the total number of executions in all of 2014. Amnesty International has warned that state-sanctioned deaths could top 1,000 by the end of the year.
There is no shortage of evidence of how in the past Western-supplied goods became tools of repression. This is best illustrated by the salient example of the former Finnish-German venture Nokia Siemens Networks, which supplied censorship and surveillance technology to Iran allowing the IRGC to monitor and disrupt mobile and internet usage of pro-democracy activists during uprising against the officially declared victory of Ahmadinejad in 2009.
Iran’s trade with the EU last year totalled €7.6 billion and officials from different member states have already flocked to Tehran to get a piece of the boom-time pie which could grow by 400 per cent by mid-2018. The EU’s biggest trading giants have wasted no time in gaining a head start in the race to win billions of euros’ worth of business.more