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Opinion: Canada should support Iranians' efforts to build a post-regime democracy

Iranians deserve freedom from the regime which has violently and horrifically repressed them for over four decades

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On Saturday, the United States and Israel launched a joint operation against the Islamic Republic’s regime in Iran, with the stated goals of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and helping the Iranian people topple the repressive regime.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney announced Canada’s support for the operation, echoed by the leader of the opposition, Pierre Poilievre. In his statement, Carney expressed Canada’s position as follows:

Opinion: Canada should support Iranians' efforts to build a post-regime democracy Back to video

“The Islamic Republic of Iran is the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East, has one of the world’s worst human rights records, and must never be allowed to obtain or develop nuclear weapons.”

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For 46 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran has engaged in a continuous dual campaign of internal repression and external aggression.

Upon seizing power through the bloody 1979 revolution, the Islamic Republic immediately began systematically imprisoning, torturing and executing thousands of opposition figures, dissidents, and ethnic and religious minority groups.

In 2024, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Mr. Javaid Rehman, declared that between 1981-82 and 1988, the Islamic Republic perpetrated “the worst and the most egregious human rights abuses of our living memory whereby high-ranking state officials connived, conspired and actively engaged to plan, order and commit crimes against humanity and genocide against the nationals of their own state.”

The Islamic Republic’s horrific repression of its own citizens has continued unabated until today. The Iranian people have been stripped of their fundamental rights, Iranian women suffer under a gender apartheid and minority groups such as the Baha’i have been systematically targeted and oppressed.

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Over the years, the Iranian people have bravely resisted and protested the horrific abuses of the Islamic Republic’s regime. Iranians rose up en masse to advocate for democracy during the Green Movement in 2009. In 2022, Iranian women valiantly launched the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in response to the killing of Jina Mahsa Amini for her refusal to wear a hijab. And now, since the end of 2025, the Iranian people have been engaged in the largest uprising in the history of the Islamic Republic.

In response, the regime has murdered an estimated 30,000 people and arbitrarily arrested an estimated 53,000, including hundreds of children. Those arrested are subject to torture, forced confessions and execution. When wounded civilians are brought to hospitals, Iranian regime agents have murdered them in their hospital beds and arrested doctors who attempt to help them. These atrocities have continued up until now.

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At the same time, the Islamic Republic has exported its atrocities, violence, and repression throughout the Middle East and the world. As Carney said, Iran is “the principal source of instability and terror throughout the Middle East.”

For decades, the Iranian regime has funded, trained, supported and directed terrorist proxies throughout the Middle East, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria, the Houthis in Yemen and multiple Iraqi militia groups. These proxies have committed countless horrific atrocities, massacring civilians and destabilizing their host countries and the region more broadly.

The Iranian regime’s support for terror and atrocities extends far beyond the Middle East. Iran was responsible for the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which killed 85 people and injured over 300. In January 2020, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) shot down Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, killing all 176 passengers, including 57 Canadians. Since Russia’s criminal invasion of Ukraine began in 2022, Iran has supplied weapons including Shahed drones to Russia, which have been used to terrorize and murder Ukrainian civilians. Finally, on Saturday, in his response to the American-Israeli strikes, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer stated that the Iranian regime has been responsible for 20 foiled terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom.

The Islamic Republic is also a leading global source of transnational repression — the targeting of dissidents, activists, journalists and opposition figures abroad. In October 2018, assassination plots against Iranian opposition figures were foiled in both Denmark and France. In 2021, the FBI foiled an effort to murder Masih Alinejad, an Iranian human rights activist, in New York. And, here in Canada, one of the authors of this op-ed (Irwin Cotler), who has long warned of the Islamic Republic’s massive domestic repression and external aggression, has been under 24/7 police protection due to the Islamic Republic’s ongoing efforts to murder him since 2023.

The Iranian people deserve better. They deserve freedom from the regime which has violently and horrifically repressed them for over four decades. They deserve justice, democracy and a peaceful, human rights-respecting government.

Carney has made clear that Canada will not enter this conflict militarily, and we agree with that. Instead, Canada should work with the United States, Israel, the community of democracies, and most importantly, the Iranian opposition, to start preparing for the day after the Islamic Republic.

Canada can and should play a role in supporting the Iranian people in their efforts to build a free and democratic Iran. We should be in contact with, provide resources and international legitimacy to the Iranian opposition. We should help them build the country that they deserve.

Irwin Cotler is a former Minister of Justice and Attorney-General of Canada, is the founder and International Chair of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights, and has represented Iranian political prisoners for decades.

Nazanin Afshin-Jam is an award-winning human rights and democracy advocate, co-founder of the Iranian Justice Collective and Stop Child Executions, and organizer of a network of over a hundred Iranian diaspora groups and other high-profile advocates from around the world.

Noah Lew is Special Advisor to Mr. Cotler, and a director of the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights.

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