The EU’s policy on Iran is totally flawed and it is nowhere more evident than the attitude of its foreign policy chief, Federica Mogherini regarding the despicable situation of human rights in that country.

Mogherini’s misplaced priorities were prominently on display on August 5, when she stood alongside dictators and terrorist leaders from the world over who had also decided to show their support for Iran’s clerical regime by attending the second-term inauguration of President Hassan Rouhani.

This would be bad enough if the country’s abuses were a recent phenomenon, but it is made worse by the fact that the ongoing inaction of Western powers leaves countless Iranians waiting for the justice that has already been denied to them for decades.

The case in point is the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in the summer of 1988. These victims were condemned to hang on the basis of a fatwa from the Islamic Republic’s founder, Ruhollah Khomeini. Their trials before a hastily assembled “death commission” lasted two minutes on average, and the resulting executions were aimed at stamping out all opposition to the fledgling theocracy, particularly the opposition coming from the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran.

In her report from August 14 that was sent to the General Assembly, the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran formally acknowledges these mass executions and Khomeini’s fatwa. In my remarks at a major rally in London on September 2, I reiterated that: “Now it is time for the European Union to follow suit and to show at least the minimum concern for Iran’s human rights situation by condemning this massacre and call upon the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to establish an investigative inquiry in order to hold the perpetrators to account.”

If the organisation cannot make this most obvious of statements, it will be more clear than ever that its foreign policy is in desperate need of new leadership.

Struan Stevenson MEP

President of the European Iraqi Freedom Association