Sanctions in February, handshakes in September: EU’s flip-flop Iran policy is putting lives at risk

Why would the European Union list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation in February, and then, seven months later, have its top diplomat sit down with the foreign minister of the government the Guard Corps defends? At the UN General Assembly last month, EU chief diplomat Kaja Kallas met Abbas Araghchi, who served in the Guard Corps during the Iran–Iraq war. Dutch prime minister Rob Jetten met president Masoud Pezeshkian, who in 2019 joined fellow parliamentarians in wearing the Guard Corps uniform to protest Washington’s terrorist designation of it. France, Italy, and Norway held meetings of their own. These talks came less than nine months after Iranian security forces, on 8 and 9 January, killed protesters on a scale without precedent in the country’s modern history. The human rights group HRANA has verified more than 7,000 deaths, and the UN special rapporteur warned that the toll may exceed 20,000. In September, the UN fact-finding mission concluded that the crackdown amounted to crimes against humanity. Nor has the killing stopped: Iran Human Rights counted at least 532 executions in the first eight months of this year, including protesters arrested in January. After a massacre, a foreign policy guided by European values should pursue one aim above others: making a repetition more costly for those who would order and carry it out. Naming and shaming raises the reputational cost of repression, targeted sanctions raise its material cost, and delegitimisation raises the political cost of staying loyal to the regime. They work only in combination, since sanctions without delegitimization tell the regime’s elite that their assets are at risk, but their standing is not. EU vs US sanctions Europe has used the first two instruments. The EU listed the Guard Corps in February and sanctioned additional Iranian officials for human rights abuses. However, these measures target assets and individuals, while the government that presided over the killing keeps its seat at the top table. The UNGA in New York showed how little the third instrument has been used. The terrorist listing freezes the Guard Corps' funds. Neither Araghchi nor Pezeshkian is on an EU sanctions list. Yet it leaves a question unanswered: how far should the logic of a terrorist designation extend to the government that funds and publicly defends it? Article 21 of the Treaty on European Union requires the Union's external action to be guided by human rights and to be consistent. Branding the Guard Corps a terrorist organisation in Brussels while posing for photographs with the government it defends in New York sits uneasily with that obligation. This inconsistency is costly. In a study in foreign policy analysis, my co-authors and I examined how Iranians reacted to US sanctions. Comprehensive sanctions produced a rally around the government, even among reformists. The 2019 designation of the Guard Corps, by contrast, produced almost no rally outside the regime's hardliner core. Thus, targeted pressure on the security apparatus does not drive Iranians into its arms. Handshakes, on the other hand, may give the apparatus exactly what targeted sanctions are meant to withhold: international legitimacy. The photographs from New York reach two audiences. The first sits inside the state: an officer deciding whether to fire on a crowd, or to step aside, weighs one question above most others, namely whether the regime will survive, and each of those photographs suggests an answer. The second audience is the families of those killed, executed, and blinded since January. For them, the message is that Europe has moved on after eight months. A picture is worth a thousand words I am not against diplomacy. Kallas raised the sharp rise in executions with Araghchi, and Jetten raised human rights and Iranian actions on Dutch soil with Pezeshkian. Channels on shipping, detained Europeans, and de-escalation should stay open. My objection concerns the level and the format: a meeting between leaders, photographed at the General Assembly with no public conditions attached, is not a technical channel. Concerns voiced in private do not travel as far as the photograph, which signals normal relations with a government that has done nothing to earn them. Four steps would help. First, the Council should agree on a common line: contact at the technical and envoy level, and leader-level meetings only on public conditions, beginning with a halt to protest-related executions. Second, human rights sanctions should move up the chain of command, to those who answer politically for the security forces. Third, member states should invest in accountability that does not depend on Tehran, such as universal jurisdiction cases and evidence-sharing with the UN mission. Finally, Europe should engage openly with Iran's democratic opposition. The EU has already decided, in law, what the Guard Corps is. Its leaders have yet to act accordingly. A massacre answered with sanctions in February and handshakes in September does not raise the cost of the next one. It lowers it.