The EU will list Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as a terror group later today, according to foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.
Kallas, the vice-president of the European Commission and the body’s high representative for foreign affairs, confirmed that a meeting of the bloc’s foreign ministers this afternoon is expected to place stringent new sanctions on Tehran.
The measures come in response to a crackdown on mass anti-government protests, which were sparked by an economic collapse in December and saw hundreds of thousands take to the streets across all 31 of the country’s provinces.
However, a brutal response from security services saw at least 6,000 killed, with some human rights groups claiming the true figure tops 30,000, and the demonstrations were largely crushed last week.
“We are putting new sanctions on Iran and I also expect we will list the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist list,” Kalls told reporters ahead of the Brussels meeting.
"If you act as a terrorist, you should also be treated as terrorists.”
The IRGC is the main paramilitary arm of the regime’s security apparatus and plays a key role in suppressing dissent.
As well as its involvement in the stifling of domestic protests, it has also orchestrated numerous plots abroad, including the attempted assassinations of dissidents and a campaign of targeting the Jewish community, according to several Western security services.
For example, Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, revealed last year that Asio, the country’s intelligence service, had traced the firebombings of several synagogues and a Jewish nursery in 2024 back to the IRGC.
The US designated the IRGC as a Foreign Terrorist Organisation in 2019, with Australia following suit in August last year.
In the UK, though, multiple governments have declined to proscribe the group, arguing that it is not legally practical to treat a state-affiliated military force in the same manner as non-state terror groups, including those backed by Iran like Hamas and Hezbollah.
Most recently, despite Labour promising in opposition to proscribe the group, Business Secretary Peter Kyle rejected calls to do so.
Asked earlier this month on Times Radio whether a proscription was being considered, Peter Kyle said: "No. You can see we’ve already used the sanctions against Iran to the full extent we can.
"Proscribing [the IRGC] like we do domestic organisations isn’t appropriate," he added, emphasising that the IRGC is a "state organisation".
Instead, ministers announced in May that they are developing a system to similarly restrict support for state-backed organisations in a parallel system to the one used to ban terror groups.
Hinting strongly at the IRGC, then-Home Secretary Yvette Cooper said the plan was drawn up against the “backdrop of rising numbers of Iran-linked operations on UK soil where there have been repeated warnings by ministers, the police and our security and intelligence agencies”.
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