Mr Alistair Carmichael
MP for Orkney and Shetland · Liberal Democrat · United Kingdom
“I do not know whether this is something I still need to declare, Mr Speaker, but I visited the Falkland Islands in 2003 as a guest of the Falkland Islands Government. They have never invited me back.”
“I remind the House of my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests and also that my wife is a practising veterinary surgeon. What is happening was predictable because it was predicted. The Government were warned by the National Audit Office in June last year that they were unprepared for outbreaks of this sort.”
“The Minister is surely aware that there is no route to net zero that does not go through oil and gas hydrocarbons, and that not exploiting resources on the UK continental shelf leaves us reliant on imports, which also has carbon consequences that must be taken into account.”
“The transition to clean energy could be an opportunity to build a different model that would, to use the First Secretary of State’s own words, end “overly centralised decision making and over-privatisation”.”
“I welcome what the Prime Minister just said about strengthening farming. If he is serious about this, one of the first things he can do is ensure that our farmers do not have to compete with imported food that is produced to lower standards than we expect.”
“Q4. Like others, I have always respected the Prime Minister as somebody who was in politics because he wanted to give service to his country, and he has earned our gratitude for that. In my constituency, those who volunteer as coastguard rescue officers also do so from a wish to give service to their community.”
The complete record
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“As things stand, nobody has taken charge and nobody is taking an overall, holistic view. As a consequence, we fear that the fishing industries will be excluded. I will mention in passing a particular concern of ours in Orkney. Our brown crab fishery is very important to us, but the female brown crab is migratory. It goes from Orkney and around to the west coast of Scotland, but its behaviour is affected by the electromagnetic frequencies from some of the cables. The science is in its infancy and there is a lot that we do not understand. In every other respect, we proceed on a precautionary basis, and I hope that some effort will be made to ensure that there is a proper understanding of how these things fit into the wider seabed use. The subject of scientific advice has long been of concern to the industry.”
“We have significant development to the west of Shetland, and I am keen to see that, but at some point somebody has to say, “There has to be a strategy for managing the marine area”, so that the salami slicing does not continue. As a consequence of the growth of offshore wind, vessels will be excluded from something like 4.28% of the area. In and of itself, that is not unmanageable, but it is 4.28% on top of all the other slices that have already been taken off the joint. My plea to the Minister is for someone in Government to take control. The growth of offshore wind will result in more cabling on the seabed. Surely it is not beyond the wit of man to find a way to bring all those cables together instead of leaving them like a plate of spaghetti on the seabed.”
“In 2000, fishing boats were excluded from less than 1% of UK waters. The SFF and the NFFO estimate that by 2050 we could see fishing effort excluded from no less than 49% of the exclusive economic zone around the UK as a whole. In Scotland, the figure could be as high as 56%, and that is before we know the actual extent and meaning of HMPAs—highly protected marine areas. It seems inevitable that there will be further restriction. It will be interesting to see how that all works. It is not that any individual source is particularly difficult; there is a cumulative effect. We have had the growth of aquaculture and offshore and gas activities. We now have the coming of offshore wind and floating wind.”
“Why not accept that this is a dangerous practice and that proper action is needed to deal with it now? Get the different devolved Administrations, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, and the Department for Transport around the table, and find a way to offer our fishing boats proper protection when they absolutely need it. As I indicated earlier, spatial squeeze continues to cause great and growing concern in the fishing industry right around the coastline. If the Minister has not yet read the work done by the Scottish Fishermen’s Federation and the National Federation of Fishermen’s Organisations, I would certainly commend it to him. That work first tracks the position from 2000 to today, and then it looks forward to 2050.”
“He very nearly came to grief as a consequence of the actions of a Spanish trawler, the Pesorsa Dos. The hon. Member for Banbury got together all the various parts of Government. There was quite an impressive number of civil servants and lawyers on the call, but it seemed that everybody was looking for an excuse—for why it was somebody else’s problem. Everybody acknowledged that the situation should not be allowed to continue, but nobody was prepared to find a working solution to it. I say to the Minister today that that piece of work remains live. If we do not do it, the situation experienced by a number of Shetland boats in recent years will only get worse. I can guarantee that eventually somebody will end up at the bottom of the sea. There will be a tragedy, and then there will be a rush to find a solution.”
“If we are talking about a form of sea fishing that must “comply with all applicable rules, regulations, and technical standards, when carrying out their fishing operations”, why have we not introduced regulations that state simply that any boat carrying out gill netting—if we continue to allow it—has to declare the number of nets on board when it comes into our waters and the number of nets when going out? We could then see that there is no mismatch. We could control the fact that the nets are being left at the bottom of the sea. That is the very least that we should be doing, but even that seems to be beyond the political will of the Governments. The Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Banbury, undertook a piece of work when I brought to her attention the situation faced by the skipper of the Alison Kay in Shetland.”
“The statement goes on to say: “As with all forms of sea fishing, gill net vessels must comply with all applicable rules, regulations, and technical standards, when carrying out their fishing operations.” We are also told: “The safety of our fishers is of paramount importance and any allegations of behaviour that risks the lives of fishers and the safety of vessels are very serious.” We know that, because we have seen quite shocking examples of Spanish gill netters forcing Shetland boats off their fishing grounds, which has sometimes come very close to having tragic consequences.”
“Gill netting is a legitimate form of fishing activity permitted within Scottish waters.’” Think about that for a second. An official Government spokesperson from the Government in Edinburgh describes gill netting as a legitimate form of fishing activity permitted within Scottish waters. I suppose that, legally, that is a justifiable statement, but in terms of displaying an understanding of what gill netting is about, and given the way in which it is used on an industrial scale and the impact it has on our local fleets, I think that was a shockingly complacent thing to say.”
“It lies within the control of the Minister here and his colleagues in the devolved Administrations. The inability, or the lack of political will, to tackle something so fundamental is really frustrating the industry and the fishing communities that are most directly affected by it. There have been demonstrations in the streets in Shetland about gill netting. Last week, the local newspaper, The Shetland Times , carried a comment that sums up the lack of urgency around tackling this issue. It states: “The Scottish Government responded with an unattributed statement” —not something that got anywhere near a Minister— “which said: ‘We take protection of the marine environment seriously and are clear that any form of dumping and other illegal activities is completely unacceptable.”
“Spanish boats, in particular, regardless of where they are flagged, come in with gill nets that run to several kilometres in some cases. They exclude local boats, especially whitefish boats, from grounds they have fished for generations. It is a particularly environmentally and ecologically unsustainable way of catching fish. It is also a major contributor to plastic pollution, because the nets are often just cut adrift and left on the bottom of the seabed to be caught up by others in the fullness of time. My frustration is that we have nobody else to blame now. For years, we could look to Brussels and say, “We’ve got to let the Spaniards in because we are part of the European Union, and they can do this and that,” but we no longer have anybody else to blame. It lies within our own control.”
“The Government claim to care about growth, but who profits from that particularly unhelpful and narrow interpretation of what is required? I am sorry for labouring the point; it is the luxury of having the time to do it. I know this is not the Minister’s responsibility, but in addition to his direct ministerial responsibilities, the industry looks to him as its advocate in Government. I hope he will pursue that case as vigorously as he can with Home Office Ministers. It should have been sorted years ago, and it is nothing short of a scandal that it has not been. The other issue of particular concern to me—I have spoken about it in the past, and it is of growing interest to my constituents—is the industrial-scale gill netting that we still see around so much of our waters. For us in Shetland, it is a particularly acute issue.”
“Surely it would not be beyond the wit of man for someone in the Home Office to design a scheme—the principle of which already seems to have been conceded and the advice on which is consistent with that of the Migration Advisory Committee—which would allow the industry to get the access to the crews they need. The shellfish boats in my constituency in particular—Orkney has a significant brown clam fleet, of which I will speak later—do not fish outside the 12-mile limit for the most part, so they are not able to use the transit visa route. As a consequence, those fishers are left unable to operate the boats that they have committed to and taken finance on, and ultimately they will not be able to make a living. If they go, the shoreside jobs in processing and exports go.”
“We eventually persuaded it to change the advice given to Ministers. As a consequence, the Home Office brought forward a scheme to allow a number of non-EEA nationals to work on UK vessels. In fact, however, the way in which immigration rules work is such that very few of those visas have been able to be taken up—principally because very few of those who would be coming to work under that visa scheme are able to meet the English language test requirements. It is a particularly narrow definition of what it is to be a skilled worker that says that someone has to obtain that level of English language skill.”
“The way in which transit visas work—they are usually intended for merchant ships to take on crew coming in through United Kingdom ports—leaves those who fish on UK vessels but only through the means of a transit visa without the protections of minimum wage, health and safety, and the general employment conditions that we would all expect of any other sector. There have been some well-documented abuses of crew who have been brought in this way, although that is by no means a universal. I would like to think that such cases are still the exception, rather than the rule, but we do need a working visa scheme. We first did battle on the issue through the Migration Advisory Committee, which for years denied that it could deal with the matter, because the job was not listed as a high-skilled occupation.”
“In the meantime, however, we need a sensible immigration policy that will allow us to get the crew who are needed to keep the boats going, especially, but not exclusively, for the inshore fleet. At the moment, the bigger boats that are able to operate outside the 12-mile limit can bring in non-European economic area nationals on transit visas. That route has been employed for years now. Frankly, it is an abuse of the transit visa system, although I do not say that as any sort of criticism, because, in fact, it has been the only route available to skippers wanting to bring in non-EEA nationals.”
“There is no arguing with the proposition that we would like to see fishing boats in the United Kingdom crewed by local crew—this is an important source of employment for many fishing communities—but we have to be realistic about the fact that for decades many young people in our schools and colleges have been told that the industry has no future for them and have been gently discouraged from going into it. It will take a long time to turn that around, and to allow young people to see that it is an industry with great opportunities for them and in which they can have a future—a future that, in turn, will be there for their children when it comes to that time.”
“If nobody acts now and we do not find a proper strategic approach to this issue, all of those things will squeeze fishing to the margins. The first challenge to which I want the Minister to apply his mind is more immediate—namely, the availability of crew from outside the United Kingdom. This is a matter on which I and others in this House have been fighting for years, and it sometimes feels like we get one step forward only to then go two steps back.”
“While the prospects are good for an industry that is in a strong position and fundamentally sound, there is no room for complacency and it has to be accepted that these prospects are somewhat brittle. In the medium to long term, some of which I will deal with today, the industry is increasingly concerned about a number of different threats, some of which will, if they are not addressed now, be existential for the industry or parts of it. I am thinking in particular of the pressures of spatial squeeze, with other industries having grown over the years. We have seen the coming of oil and gas industry pipelines, electricity cables, fibre-optic cables and now the growth of offshore renewables, such as electricity generation.”
“If we look at the current prospects of the fishing industries, we will see that there is still some cause for optimism. The fundamental proposition of the UK fishing industries is a sound one, but it is also fragile at the same time. It has to be said that the industry is facing severe challenges. There is the rising cost of fuel. A lot of the boats, particularly in fleets such as mine in Shetland, are already subject to significant costs from interest payments on loans for their purchase, and if interest rates go up, that will be challenging. Of course, like every other industry, they have the challenges of wage increases and general inflation.”
“I hope that he will find he gets good assistance and mature co-operation from around the House, as has generally been the practice over the years on fisheries matters. I think it would be appropriate to pay tribute to the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Banbury (Victoria Prentis), who took on the brief and managed it through, let us say, a tricky time. She did not always deliver everything we wanted—she would have been the first Fisheries Minister to have done so had that been the case—but she was sincere in her commitment and we were impressed by her engagement with the industry and by how generous she was with the time she gave to MPs with a fishing interest. We wish her well as she undertakes her new responsibilities.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered post-Brexit fisheries management. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Mundell, and to welcome the new Fisheries Minister to his position. He and I have worked together in previous roles in the House, and I am delighted that we have the opportunity to continue working together. I have always found him to be a straightforward and decent man to deal with, and I hope he will continue to take that approach to his new responsibilities. It is not always the easiest or most attractive brief to take on in Government, but for communities such as mine in the north-east of Scotland and for many small coastal communities around our country, it is an enormously important one.”
“Why are we not doing more to protect our own fleet? We have nobody else to blame now.”
“The hon. Gentleman knows, because I have said it often enough, that I felt that the fishing industry was used in the course of the Brexit debate. I could understand the reasons why the industry wanted to believe the things that it was promised; he has touched upon some of those reasons. Nevertheless, we are where we are now and we do not have Brussels to blame any more; we have to look to our own resources. Does the hon. Gentleman share my frustration that there are so many things that we could do better now for ourselves, but that we are not doing? I touched on one thing—gill netting. I will offer him another, which is Marine Scotland’s practice of always picking the low-hanging fruit—that is, the Scottish vessels—while leaving Spanish vessels fishing in UK waters, relatively unscathed in terms of interruption and intervention.”
“Actually, I find myself in agreement with the hon. Gentleman. I am sure he was as surprised as I was to hear the right hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Ms Dorries) say that we needed people to come in to help with the broadband roll-out. The other sector that I should have touched on but did not—that was remiss of me—is the processing sector, which is absolutely desperate for labour to process the fish. We can catch every fish in the sea if we want, but it will not earn us any money if we do not have people to process it and sell it onwards. Through the hon. Gentleman, I might add to the question of labour for the processing sector to the list that the Minister has to take to the Home Office. It is a serious and pressing matter.”
“I do not think anyone is looking for “lots more visas”, to use the Minister’s words. We are looking for a visa regime that matches the skills that are needed for the crew that we are looking for. It is as simple as that.”
“I had a sense that the Minister was coming to his peroration, so I wanted to bring him back to the point I made about co-operation with the industry in relation to scientific advice. The industry is very keen to work with the Government to ensure that there is the best possible advice—based on sound science, but available in a timely manner—to inform the decision-making process. It is not easy. If it were, it would have been done years ago. Will the Minister undertake to talk to the fishing organisations to get that workstream working properly?”
“If the Minister goes away with no other message from today’s debate, I ask him to take this away: his chances of getting the best possible deal for our fishing industry will always be increased the more he talks to and listens to the industry itself. I do not know how many Fisheries Ministers I have seen come and go over the years, but the difference between a good one and a bad one has always been their willingness to engage with the industry. There is good will and there is an enormous amount—a wealth, indeed—of expertise there, but it has to be asked for. Question put and agreed to. Resolved , That this House has considered post-Brexit fisheries management.”
“Of course, “post-Brexit” means after Brexit, so I really want the focus of these debates to be about how we manage things now that we are in the position that we are in, however much I may have wished not to be here, because that is what the industry is looking for us to do. The Minister has a number of substantial tasks on his plate between now and the end of the year. The EU-UK-Norway talks have taken the place that arguably they always did had, rather than the December Fisheries Council, which we all tended to obsess about. Those talks are the focus of what will be on his agenda. We wish him well in that regard, because it is in everybody’s interests that he is successful and gets the best possible deal.”
“I will give fair notice to the House that I intend to keep coming back to this subject. It is very important that the House has time available for fisheries to be debated. In terms of the whole GDP of the United Kingdom, fishing is not a massive industry, but for those communities for which fishing matters, it matters a great deal. Next year, though, I think that I will just talk about fisheries management instead of the post-Brexit situation. I always tend to assume a degree of classical education among Members of Parliament; I may be a wee bit old-fashioned in that regard.”
“Thank you very much indeed, Mr Mundell, for calling me to wind up the debate. When I spoke to the Minister about this debate yesterday, I expressed concern that we were seeing people dropping out of the debate, but I said, “Don’t worry. I can do the whole three hours on my own if necessary.” The Minister normally has a very good poker face, but I must say that he lost a bit of colour in his face when I said that. However, I can assure the House that I will not use the remainder of the time allocated for this debate to reprise the outstanding issues. Of course this debate comes, as the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart) said, in succession to the piece of work that we did in the APPG, which itself came after a debate on fishing in July last year.”
“I invite the hon. Gentleman to offer a view on whether there might be a fifth point for consideration. What has come out of the India discussions shows us that we must have a domestic politics that mirrors the approach in international trade. Otherwise, we will not have successful trade negotiations.”
“This year, over the summer in particular, Baha’is in Iran have faced what The New York Times characterised as a “sweeping crackdown” on their community. That new wave of suppression by Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence has included unwarranted arrests of believers and faith leaders, a deeply concerning rise in the confiscation and destruction of property, and accusations that followers of the Baha’i faith have acted as spies for Israel.”
“In particular, we should mourn the loss of the 22-year-old Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini, who tragically died in police custody after being detained for alleged violations of Iran’s strict dress code. It is in this context—that of a brutal regime—that we come to Iran’s repression of the Baha’i community inside its own borders. Iran’s religious minorities have suffered for too long at the hands of the state. The Baha’i community of Iran has an estimated 350,000 believers, who have long faced systematic oppression orchestrated by the Government. That alone merits discussion, but the alarming increase in persecutions of the Baha’i community in recent months further shows the need to shine a spotlight on the issue.”
“The people whose names I will mention should understand that their suffering and persecution are seen, and that they will not be ignored by those of us who care about human rights for everyone. Iran does not have a good record on human rights; I think that is an uncontroversial statement across the Chamber. However, rather than getting to grips with it, the country has in recent years stepped up the oppression of its own people. From the arbitrary detention of protesters to the persecution of the LGBTQ+ community and the second highest number of executions in the world, there is a great deal about which we should worry in the state of human rights and freedom in Iran. I do not want to touch on it at any great length, but it would be remiss of me if I were not to mention what we have seen in recent weeks in Iran.”
“Orkney and Shetland are home to two small but very effective, warm and welcoming Baha’i communities, which have demonstrated great fellowship to me and my family over the years, for which I have always been enormously grateful. Persecution of the Baha’i community in Iran is hardly new; it has been a feature of life for Baha’is in Iran since the 1979 revolution. However, over the summer, we saw a sharp increase in the number of innocent Baha’is facing persecution by the Iranian state. It is unfortunate—it grieves me—that we have to bring this matter to the House today, but I hope that those who are suffering that persecution will take some comfort from hearing reference made to it in this House.”
“I beg to move, That this House has considered the treatment of the Baha’i community in Iran. It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Mr Betts. I welcome the Minister to her position, and I am grateful that there are a number of other colleagues in the Chamber. I chair the all-party parliamentary group on the Baha’i faith; in that regard, before I come to the meat of what I want to say, let me place on the record the appreciation that I feel, and I know my predecessors felt, for the work of the UK Baha’i Office of Public Affairs. Dan Wheatley, in particular, and his various colleagues over the years have been of enormous service to us all, and to the Baha’i community in my constituency.”
“Indeed I do, and I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for the work he does to promote freedom of religion or belief around the world. He makes a very good point, and I hope to give some context in reference to the situation in which the Baha’is in Iran find themselves.”
“I absolutely do. I am grateful to the hon. Lady for making that point because it means that I will not need to say quite so much about that subject and that I can continue to take interventions. I am happy to take interventions, because it is important that, when the record is printed, it is seen that this is not a tiny concern but one that extends across the House.”
“People should understand that this issue matters to Britain—not just to individuals but to our Government as a whole. While I am on the subject, I should place on the record my appreciation for the remarks made by Lord Ahmad earlier in the year. They were heard by the Baha’i community in this country and beyond, and they were certainly very much appreciated.”
“Absolutely. In many ways Baha’is are low-hanging fruit—this issue is not just confined to Iran but it is particularly acute there—because they are a tiny religious minority. As somebody who has campaigned on human rights for many years, including before I came to this House as a Member of Parliament, I know that that increases rather than diminishes our obligation to draw attention to their plight. We can do a lot as individual Members of Parliament, but I hope that the Government, who speak for the country as a whole, will take that message to heart in everything we say as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council and still, I hope, a country to which the world looks as a force for good and as a protector and, in many cases, a creator of human rights legislation.”
“Afif Naemi, Mahvash Sabet and Fariba Kamalabadi have already served 10 years of their life in prison for their service to the Baha’i community, and the Yaran committee has been wound up, so all three have, in fact, retired from roles of religious leadership. Furthermore, the mass arrest of 26 Baha’is in the city of Shiraz alone is exceptionally worrying. The number of Baha’is raided, arrested or recalled to prison has increased significantly since June.”
“When it comes to human rights and freedom of religion, we are not safe unless everyone is safe. The Baha’i International Community reported 125 separate incidents of persecution in the first 10 days of August 2022 alone—a worrying development that signals a step up in the regime’s attempts to crack down on an already heavily persecuted religious minority. By 1 September, the number of incidents in the crackdown had almost doubled to 245. I fear that it is doubtless even higher today. I want to highlight a number of developments that show the breadth and depth of these changes. First, the regime has upped its campaign against religious minority leaders in Iran by rearresting three former members of the Yaran, the informal leadership committee of the Baha’i community.”
“A breach of human rights is a breach of human rights. It is invidious to try to construct a hierarchy of human rights, because the defining characteristic of human rights is that they are universal. But one of my particular concerns is the pervasive way in which the Iranian state persecutes the Baha’i community. It is not just the persecution of their religious belief, but their exclusion from education, the closing of their businesses—there is persecution in a whole range of ways. That is not an accident. It is a quite deliberate strategy that is designed to persecute people simply because of their religious belief. If we allow it to happen to the Baha’is, it will happen to other religious minorities as well. If it can happen in Iran, it can happen in just about any other country.”
“In addition to the plight of the Baha’is, we witness a wider human rights crisis engulfing Iran and taking the lives of young Iranians, most notably young women. Iran has failed that litmus test. The Baha’i community and all other persecuted religious minorities across the globe deserve better. They deserve our support. They deserve our actions and the actions of our Government in calling out the actions of the Iranian Government where they are seen. We will not ignore what is happening. I hope that, if this is heard in Tehran, that is the one message that they will take from today’s proceedings.”
“I welcome the comments of Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, who was quick to condemn this summer’s developments, and I welcome the Government’s commitment to working with international partners to hold Iran accountable. I hope that that will not be an isolated comment and that the Government of this country will continue to call this out when they find it. What we are witnessing in Iran today is not a new development. The Baha’i community have faced an unjust assault on their freedoms for decades, but it is deeply troubling to watch this new intensification unfold. For many years, Baha’i officers around the world have suggested that the treatment of their community in Iran offered an instructive litmus test on the sincerity of Iranian authorities towards reform and respect for human rights.”
“The explicit policy to take away the social and economic rights of the Baha’is is driven by a memorandum from the Supreme Revolutionary Cultural Council back in 1991, which was prepared for the Supreme Leader to deal with what was termed “the Baha’i question”. Just consider the use of that term, “the Baha’i question”. This memorandum’s provisions say that the Iranian Government should conduct their dealings with the Baha’i community in such a way that “their progress and development are blocked”. As this shows, the recent sweeping crackdown is just the latest in a long line of actions against believers of the Baha’i faith. The oppression of the Baha’is in Iran has, however, been noticed and will continue to be noticed, and it will be rightfully condemned by human rights campaigners, media and Government.”
“Iranian authorities have systematically closed Baha’i-owned shops without legitimate cause. We also have the horrific situation of more than 1,000 Baha’is facing legal hearings on false charges or being summoned to be put into overcrowded prisons— something that is unjust and unsustainable. But the cruelty does not stop there. In April 2021, Amnesty International reported that authorities prevented Baha’is from burying their loved ones in empty plots at a cemetery near Tehran, insisting that they bury them between existing graves or at the nearby Khavaran mass grave, a site related to the 1988 prison massacres. This ban was eventually lifted after mass public outcry, but the fact that it was ever even imposed shows the Iranian regime’s contempt for the Baha’is within its own borders.”
“This year, as of August 2022, more than 90 Baha’i students were prevented from enrolling in Iranian universities, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence has further accused believers of espionage and infiltrating education institutions. In 2020, Baha’i faith believers became unable to register for identity cards for a similar reason to that given to those applying for higher education. The option of “other religion” was removed from the application form—an example of Iran cracking down on even a hint of an already oppressed minority—and that has caused real problems, as the Baha’is are not allowed to lie about their faith. Baha’i-owned shops have been another target of the Iranian regime in recent years.”
“Amnesty International reports that villagers had their mobile phones taken to stop them filming, while peaceful protesters were beaten and targeted with pepper spray. That incident follows a similar demolition of at least 50 homes in the village of Ivel, also in the Mazandaran province, in June 2021. As the hon. Member for Rutherglen and Hamilton West (Margaret Ferrier) mentioned earlier, access to education is severely limited by the state. Most Baha’is are excluded from the national entrance examination to higher education institutions because their applications are characterised as “file incomplete”—illustrating the way in which bureaucracy can be used as a tool of religious oppression—as they do not come from one of the four constitutionally recognised religions.”
“This is where it becomes personal for us all. As a parent, I can only imagine what it would be like to find myself under that sort of pressure. It touches on my earlier point about the pervasive, all-encompassing nature of the persecution of the Baha’is. They find themselves excluded from just about every aspect of normal, everyday life that we would take for granted. It is this element of systematic oppression that is particularly concerning. On 2 August 2022, Iran sealed off the village of Roushankouh in the Mazandaran province, blocking off road access by sending in 200 armed agents of the Iranian state. Six homes were demolished by heavy equipment and 20 hectares of Baha’i-owned property were confiscated, according to the Baha’i International Community.”