Posts tagged : "Foreign policy"

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Saudi Arabia has recently been severely reprimanded over its human rights violations by international organisations, mostly the Human Rights Watch, which has offered a disappointing picture of the situation in this country. Aside from its heavy involvement in the wars in Yemen and Bahrain, Saudi Arabia is still failing in several areas, including in criminal justice, women's and girl's rights and migrant workers. It's reported that over 9 million migrant workers fill manual, clerical and service jobs in the Persian Gulf country, constituting more than half of the workforce, but many of them suffer different sorts of abuse and exploitation, "amounting to conditions of forced labour." In January 2018, UN human...

Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: It’s been three years since Iran and the six world powers came to an agreement to solve the longstanding controversy surrounding Iran’s nuclear program. The nuclear deal that was signed in July 2015 was what the international community was looking for for so long. It was the concrete translation of vague and abstract ideals that everybody knew what they were, but couldn’t be actualised for several reasons, mostly political intransigence. Iran deal, according to the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, was an agreement that was supposed to be the manifestation of a zero-sum game, and even for President Obama, it was a victory. India was one of many countries that reaped major benefits from the lifting of...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: U.S. President Donald Trump has called for new sanctions against Iran and proposed decertification of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), popularly known as the Iran Deal. Trump has given the European signatories to the agreement, most importantly Britain, Germany and France, an ultimatum to fix the flaws in the Iran deal or forget about the United States’ continued investment in the agreement, which according to Trump, was Obama’s deal and one of the most disastrous and one-sided accords the U.S. has ever entered into. Terms and conditions of the JCPOA are clear. In a nutshell, Iran rolls back certain aspects of its ambitious nuclear programme, sticks to its technical...

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Iran’s role in the Middle East and the region has regularly been questioned and cast into doubt. It’s mostly questioned by the critics of the country’s controversial and ambitious nuclear program and its foreign policy. Iranians will, by and large, gloss over key issues while critics of Tehran specifically cite its foreign policy as a reason to scuttle the nuclear agreement. The current Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, was widely seen as a sensible choice to run the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The truth, however, is that there are few well-trained and educated diplomats with relevant qualifications to run the Ministry. And what progress Zarif does make on the foreign stage his...

AFP Photo Kourosh Ziabari - Medium: Four people stormed the Iranian Embassy in London on Friday, 9th March and took down the Islamic Republic’s flag to give the Iranian government authorities ammunition for the escalation of tensions with the UK at a time the case of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe is hindering the smooth and unhindered progress of bilateral relations. The attackers were arrested by the London Metropolitan Police “on suspicion of causing criminal damage and being unlawfully on diplomatic premises”. The attack was intrinsically condemned by Iran’s Foreign Ministry, and some hardliners in Tehran suggested that there is a case of negligence against the UK Police. No evidence to back up this allegation has been...