EU countries agreed on new sanctions against Iran on Monday and condemned the “brutal and disproportionate action” of Iranian authorities against peaceful protesters. Iran’s leaders have been using mass arrests and death sentences against protesters since mid-September.
Austrian Foreign Minister Alexander Schallenberg clearly supported the new sanctions before the start of the meeting of EU foreign ministers. In this matter, “we now need clear edges,” he said in Brussels on Monday. However, Schallenberg was disappointed that he had “hoped that through the Vienna Nuclear Agreement we would bring Iran back to the table of the international community”. “Sanctions are always somewhere at the end of the diplomatic alphabet, which means other measures have not worked.”
Iran is currently on a “collision course with us and its own people,” the foreign minister stressed. The regime in Tehran is trying to “crush civil society movements with all ferocity” while at the same time “throwing overboard all security mechanisms” regarding the issue of the nuclear program.
Iran is “apparently moving in the wrong direction almost at the speed of light,” Schallenberg said, also regarding drone deliveries to Russia. On the European Union’s sanctions against Iran, he said: “I think we can go further, and probably we will have to go further.”
Dozens of people and organizations have been affected
According to previous reports, the new sanctions on Iran will target about three dozen people and organizations involved in the brutal suppression of protests nationwide. For the time being, however, the European Parliament does not intend to designate the Iranian Revolutionary Guards as a terrorist organization. “In reality, the Revolutionary Guard has been under a sanctions regime since 2010, so we can consider further steps here,” explains Schallenberg. “De facto, we already have the heads of the Revolutionary Guard on sanctions lists.”
Source: Krone
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