Canadian MP Cotler: Iran must be held accountable

Canadian MP and former justice minister Irwin Cotler on Friday called on the international community to hold Iran to account for its state-sanctioned incitement for genocide against the Jewish State of Israel.

Delivering a speech in Sweden at an event titled, “Raoul Wallenberg and His Humanitarian Legacy: Universal Lessons for Our Time,” Cotler stressed that “Iran has already committed the crime of incitement to genocide prohibited under the Genocide Convention,” and said parties to the treaty are “obligated to undertake the legal measures to hold Iran accountable.”

Cotler highlighted the fact that no one state party had thus far undertaken any such initiative.

Cotler, a former chairman of the International Commission of Inquiry on the Fate and Whereabouts of Raoul Wallenberg, also called on Russia to “open up the blank spots of history and disclose the truth of Wallenberg’s fate.” According to Cotler: “The smoking gun is somewhere in Russian archives.”

Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who saved 100,000 Hungarian Jews from the Nazis during the Holocaust and later vanished behind the Iron Curtain.

A diplomat from neutral Sweden during World War II, Wallenberg issued diplomatic protective passports to Jews. He arrived in Budapest in July 1944 as a delegate of the War Refugee Board, a relief body set up by US president Franklin Roosevelt.

Wallenberg’s last confirmed sighting was in January 1945, before Soviet authorities arrested him on espionage charges.

During his address, Cotler also raised a litany of human rights violations including the ongoing mass killings in Syria perpetrated by Bashar Assad’s regime.

“Where is the Raoul Wallenberg of today?” Cotler asked in reference to the atrocities in Syria, before denouncing the international community for its muted response to the going massacre.