British MP David Jones addressed the first day of the Free Iran World Summit on July 1, 2023.

David Jones: We Need to Protect Iranian Resistance Movement

The full text of British MP David Jones’s remarks is as follows:

I bring with me greetings from supporters from both houses of the British Parliament. We have gathered here today still shocked by the disturbing news of last week’s raid by Albanian police on Ashraf-3. And we all send our sympathy to the large number of residents who were injured in that raid. We remember in particular Ali Moistachari, who tragically lost his life. But the question arises, what was the motivation behind that raid? Why did it happen?

Now, call me a cynic, but I believe it’s not unreasonable to say that there are those in Tehran who would not have been at all unhappy by that raid by Albanian police on Ashraf-3.

The recent mass protests in Iran have demonstrated the strength of the populist support for the PMOI and that is a cause of significant concern to the regime, who will stop at nothing in their attempts to undermine, discredit and, they hope neutralize the democratic opposition movement in that country.

The obsessive, unwavering focus of the regime on the PMOI simply serves to highlight the PMOI’s effectiveness in countering the regime’s authority and exposing its vulnerabilities. The uprising has also exposed the hollowness of false political alternatives, particularly those related to the remnants of the Shah’s regime.

Propaganda attempts to present those groups as leaders of the uprising have proven unsuccessful. The Iranian people, having endured years of oppression, imprisonment, and political executions under the Shah, will not return to such a dictatorship.

I was privileged some three months ago to pay my second visit to Ashraf-3, when I said to the residents, you were at the forefront of the struggle against the regime, and you have been instrumental in mobilizing the people of Iran to stand up for their rights and claim for themselves and for their children the future of the country that they love.

The remarkable sustained growth of the PMOI networks within Iranian society is an undeniable fact. The regime knows that the PMOI has the strengths of unity a well-organized structure and the ability to mobilize nationwide protests, and it knows also that the PMOI is the only organization with a clear alternative plan for Iran.

That is why the regime is trying every trick in the book to eliminate the formidable opposition that is the PMOI. But our role today, all of us, must be to make clear our insistence that the rights of members of the Iranian resistance movement should be protected wherever they are, whether that’s in Albania, in France, in the United Kingdom, in Germany, in Italy or in the United States. In every country, they have a right to conduct legitimate political activity, exposing the systematic violations of human rights in Iran and setting out their plan for the country’s future, and every reasonable democratic country should be only too happy to protect those rights. We in the British Committee for Iran Freedom will do everything in our power to ensure that those rights, those freedoms, apply to the PMOI in the hard work they do in the United Kingdom.