The Swedish parliament voted on Wednesday to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation, following the execution of Swedish-Iranian Habib Farajollah Chaab.
Habib Farajollah Chaab had been kidnapped from Turkey in 2020 by a group working for Tehran, who had smuggled him back to Iran, where he was sentenced to death and executed for being “corrupt on Earth”, a capital offence under the country’s strict Islamic laws.
The Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs summoned Iran’s charge d’affaires in protest over the execution, one of hundreds since the start of the year. The execution of Chaab was not the only reason for the vote, as relations between the two countries have been strained since July 2020 when a Swedish court sentenced a former Iranian jailor, Hamid Nouri, to life imprisonment over the executions of political prisoners in 1988.
The European Parliament passed a resolution in January calling on the EU and member states to designate the IRGC as a terrorist group. The resolution also demanded that Iranian authorities stop the crackdown on protests that began last September, after the death of a 22-year-old Kurdish woman following her attest by the morality police.
