MONTREAL — Irwin Cotler conceded that it’s next to impossible for the Iran Accountability Act, the private member’s bill he tabled in Parliament June 9, to actually be adopted.
Irwin Cotler
But Cotler, the Liberal opposition’s special counsel on human rights, said Bill C-412 – intended to hold Iran to account for its genocidal and nuclear ambitions and repression of its people – is already making an impact.
The former justice minister said he is working on getting all-party support for the legislation and hoped it would inspire the government to use it as a model for initiating similar legislation on its own.
“Or if not, at least to be held to account as to why it’s not doing so,” Cotler said in a phone interview last week.
If the government does nothing, it will be a “standing reminder… that they are not exercising their responsibility, ” he said.
Cotler held a press conference in Ottawa last week to announce the bill with Liberal MP Ken Dryden and Roya Boroumand, director of a foundation promoting democracy and human rights in Iran.
If adopted, the bill would have Canada divest from Iran, establish a mechanism to monitor incitement there, and keep the most “virulent” inciters from that country from entering Canada, Cotler said.
The bill also would freeze the assets of those helping Iran achieve nuclear capability and enhance its “machinery of hate,” use the United Nations and international community to “bring Iran to justice” through principles of international law, and target Iran’s dependence on imported petroleum, he said.
“As a signatory of the 1948 Genocide Convention, Canada has a responsibility to prevent and punish incitement to genocide that it has largely ignored in the case of the world’s greatest threat,” Cotler said in a statement last week.
Bill C-412 “fulfils these responsibilities and affirms Canada as a world leader in fighting impunity.”
Cotler told The CJN that the bill has already begun to serve as a “concrete, tangible template” for similar initiatives in the United States and around the world that seek to “expose the dangers of a nuclear, genocidal, rights-violating Iran.”
He said the bill was the “organizing theme” of remarks that he delivered last week at a conference of the International Association of Genocide Scholars in Washington.
Cotler discussed the bill with Representative Howard Berman (D-California), chair of the House committee on foreign affairs. Berman is “exploring it in terms of an American initiative,” Cotler said.
At the end of June, Cotler is slated to testify before foreign affairs committees in Italy, Germany and Austria, all of whom he expects will examine the legislation as a “model and template” for their own countries, he said.
The bill will have influence in the “court of public opinion” and international media, Cotler added. Last week, stories on the prospective legislation appeared in the National Post and Jerusalem Post.
In his statement, Cotler said the bill would stay relevant regardless of the outcome of Iranian elections last Friday, because the danger didn’t begin with president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, he said, has also declared it Iran’s mission “to erase Israel from the map of the region.”
Cotler’s bill made news on an Iranian media website that described him as someone “widely known for his anti-Iran rhetoric.”
