Iranian President Hassan Rouhani is scheduled to arrive in New York on September 28 to participate in the United Nations General Assembly.
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It was a serene and confident Iranian President Hassan Rouhani who strode into the room of editors, anchors and columnists this morning to take his seat at the head of a U-shaped table behind a cascade of white flowers.
Rouhani complained about some of the statements made by U.S. lawmakers critical of the nuclear deal, saying they contained “extremely bitter extremist judgments” and were met with astonishment in Iran.
Iran’s president concluded that despite recent progress, mending relations “is still a long road to travel”.
The Guards have also been the central player in the high profile arrests of dual Iranian-American citizens, such as the Washington Post reporter Jason Rezaian.
According to Amnesty worldwide and other respected human rights organizations, the human rights situation in Iran is fast deteriorating under Rouhani.
The Guardian understands that the French industrial group Bouygues and Aéroports de Paris are in talks with Iran to construct the country’s largest transport project, the second terminal at Tehran’s Imam Khomeini worldwide airport.
Cruz said he would “rip to shreds” the agreement approved by Congress, and he threatened to kill Iran’s leader if he did not give up his nuclear ambitions.
The Jewish community in Britain is furious that a top government official is already announcing the intention to sign a trade deal with Iran just 2 months after the nuclear deal was signed in Vienna. Some 2000 people have been executed under Rouhani’s watch in the past two years.
With polls showing that public support for the Iran agreement is as low as 21 percent, Senate Republicans can quote Harry Reid’s arguments for invoking the “nuclear option” for confirming judges last session: surely having the Senate cast a vote on this treaty is way more important than confirming judges?
Rouhani said both countries should do what they could to move forward to freeing prisoners held by each other. President Rouhani has had even more difficulty with the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani unwilling to support or condemn the deal.
Rouhani did not answer a question from Al-Monitor about whether the intelligence branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which is believed to have arrested Rezaian and numerous Iranian civil society activists – was trying to undermine his authority and inhibit his freedom of action on both domestic and global affairs. Iran holds the record of having the most executions per capita in the world, and is the biggest executioner of juvenile offenders. But he added quickly that while stability might require democracy, “democracy can not be realized without stability”.
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“Conditions are ripe for that”, Rouhani said. “Ballot boxes can not be placed on a battlefield”.
