The US Must Impose Sanctions on Iran Regime’s State-Run Media

NCRI – During the recent anti-regime protests in Iran, members of the Iranian resistance from all over the world begged the US to enforce sanctions against Iran’s state-run media, the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB) because of its role in facilitating human rights abuses.

This should be easy because Congress actually imposed human rights-related sanctions on IRIB in the Iran Freedom and Counter-Proliferation Act of 2012 because IRIB was “broadcasting forced televised confessions and show trials,” but the Obama and Trump administrations have continually suspended these sanctions over the last four years.

Just as it did in 2012, IRIB deserves to be sanctioned for its human rights violations, which included putting up pictures of individual protesters and asking the public to name them. Many of the 8,000 protesters currently being held in Iran are being threatened with the death penalty and some have died from systematic torture.

In January, it was believed that the White House would reimpose the sanctions on IRIB in response to this abuse, but the State Department reportedly intervened and persuaded Trump to continue waiving sanctions on IRIB.

Reportedly, this was supposed to keep a deal between the US and Iran about the Regime not censoring its media, but there are vast amounts of evidence that Iran already jams the signals from Western media, so what is the point in the US sticking to its side of the deal? The US should impose the sanctions and fast.

In fact, many of Iran’s state-run media organisations are liable for sanctions because they are controlled by or linked to people that are already under US sanctions, including Iran’s Ministry of Culture and Guidance, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and more.

Some of these organisations, like IRGC-controlled Tasnim News, are not only skating by without US sanctions, they are actually allowed to have a correspondent in Washington, DC, while the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA) is allowed to have offices all over the world.

Richard Goldberg, a senior advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), and s. Ghasseminejad, a fellow at FDD, wrote on Defend Democracy: “Iranian state media are an integral part of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s war against the so-called “enemies of the revolution.” The time has come for the U.S. to stop waiving sanctions on IRIB and designate the rest of state media empire, including Tasnim News, Fars News, and IRNA. “