The UK government has just imposed over 40 new sanctions, which for most purposes are ineffective, on Tehran, hiding behind concerns about Human Rights violations. Instead of being transparent about the nature of the sanctions and why they were actually applied, London continues to feed into a Western media narrative which paints a Hollywood movie depiction of good versus evil, ultimately aimed at delegitimizing Iranian national sovereignty.

On January 14, the UK government decided to impose new sanctions on the Islamic Republic of Iran, specifically targeting Iran’s Prosecutor General, Mohammad Jaafar Montazeri, accusing him of issuing a politically motivated death sentence to Alireza Akbari. Nowhere in the official UK government’s press release, on the imposition of new sanctions, do they care to mention what Akbari, the former deputy defense minister of Iran, was found guilty of. 

The UK’s foreign secretary, James Cleverly, stated the following about the decision to introduce new sanctions against Tehran: “The Prosecutor General is at the heart of Iran’s barbaric use of the death penalty for political ends. Sanctioning him today underlines our disgust at Alireza Akbari’s execution and our commitment to holding the regime to account for its appalling human rights violations.”

The headlines in the Western media and the coverage given to the issue in general has also taken the line of the UK government, whereby Alireza Akbari is referred to as an Iranian-British dual national, glossing over the crime he was charged with. Akbari was found guilty of spying for the UK government, in conjunction with British intelligence, which would naturally cause one of the strongest legal responses imaginable from any State where such an act is uncovered. Just imagine the British response if an Iranian dual national was in a highly sensitive position of government in the UK and found guilty of working with Tehran to spy on London’s activities.

Although the penalty in the United Kingdom, for such a crime as Alireza Akbari was found guilty, would not be the death sentence, as it was officially abolished in 1998, it would be laughable if the media attempted to undermine the crime committed and simply focus on the brutal prison environments and sentence given to such an individual. In the case of the US however, Britain’s closest ally, there still is a death penalty in some States, which is one of the reasons why extradition, to the US, of political prisoner Julian Assange, is being so heavily challenged at this time.

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Ebrahim Azizi, deputy chairman of Iran’s National Security and Foreign Policy Committee, said on Monday that “the UK is not upset about Akbari's execution; Britain always causes victims to achieve its espionage goals, but it is now angry about the intelligence failure”. Azizi added that there is no need to respond to what he referred to as “baseless, unfounded and irrational” claims surrounding the issuance of Akbari’s death sentence. The Iranian authorities arrested Alireza Akbari back in 2019, uncovering that he had received a payment of 1,805,000 euros, in addition to payments of 265,000 pounds and 50,000 pounds on another occasion, for his espionage activities. 

What one concludes about the usage of the death penalty, the clear bias in Western media, following the line of the UK government, which attempts to paint Iran’s judicial system as a bunch of uncivilized barbarians praying on innocent people for political means, is stark. If there is to be a good faith argument built, surrounding the issuance of death penalties for various criminal activities inside the country, this is one thing. However, the framing of Iran’s usage of this punishment, for such a serious crime, is disingenuous and not only falls into a neo-Orientalist discourse that has been created to delegitimize Iranian sovereignty, but also absolves all the wrongdoing and blame that is to be apportioned to the UK for having paid their own dual-national for his espionage activities.  

The UK’s MI6 has also been historically involved in not only spying on the Iranian government, but, with the aid of the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), hatching a coup plot in order to overthrow the first democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. The history of British meddling in the affairs of Iran must always be factored into the popular moods today inside the country, in addition to current strains placed on the Islamic Republic, which is forced to constantly grapple with spying, espionage, assassinations of important public figures, threats to directly bombard the country, in addition to the West’s crippling economic sanctions.

Pointing to a number of the UK’s regional allies, such as Saudi Arabia, should be enough to show a clear-cut double-standard that London has when it comes to how they punish foreign governments for human rights abuses. If the UK was so concerned about the usage of the death penalty, then it would have long imposed sanctions on Riyadh for its frequent issuances of such punishments for much lesser crimes. In fact, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has shown time and time again that the death penalty will be used politically, to combat dissidents. 

Formulating such an argument about how this double-standard is applied will sometimes draw in the counter argument that one is committing “whataboutery”, which is not the intention here. Where any immoral action is taken by a government, it must be addressed for its individual sins, but when the Western media, in conjunction with the British State, work to hide the facts and single out an obvious enemy State in order to hide and minimize their own criminality, this must be called out.

There is perhaps no empire in history with as much blood on its hands as the British; the scraps of that empire, which has been continued by the United States, today behaves in a similar fashion to what it did in the past, although on a smaller scale and much of its actions are shrouded in secrecy. If the argument is going to be made about the brutality of the death penalty in Iran, then just as much time must be apportioned to the ongoing crimes of Britain. The portrayal of everything that Iran does as being inherently evil is designed to minimize those crimes. The UK’s fake concern over human rights could be no more stark as it is with this case right here, taking such an issue and omitting all the facts, refraining from any personal responsibility, continuing on with its own incorrect, Islamophobic and racist depiction of Iran.

If any system on earth can be characterized as uniquely evil, it is that of Britain, whatever you can say about Tehran’s leadership pales in comparison. If the UK government, or Western media for that matter, sought to actually protect the human rights of Iranians, they wouldn’t begin by setting the stage for a blood-soaked regime change operation inside the country; which always leads to robbing a country of any sovereignty and replacing the government with a fake democracy that claims to be liberal, whilst operating as an autocratic regime that follows a neo-liberal economic policy that serves only a rich elite domestically and the West.