No World Cup for Ahmadinejad?
If it’s up to a group of EU deputies they would rather not have President Mahmud Ahmadinejad at the World Cup ,and have requested current EU president Austria to prevent the Iranian president from entering EU territory. Iran is currently in talks with the West about giving up their nuclear programme. Iran has refused to stop uranium enrichment, and says it’s merely producing nuclear fuel for peaceful purposes.
The initiators of the open letter sent today to the EU’s Austrian presidency, all 25 member states, and FIFA, soccer’s global governing body, want to underscore how far Iran is now removed from the values the EU represents.
Charles Tannock, deputy chairman of the European Parliament’s Human Rights Committee, said the aim of the letter is first and foremost to send a “signal” that the EU will not tolerate Ahmadinejad’s controversial views.
Hopefully, it will send a very strong political signal to Iran and its president to stay well away from our territory because we don’t want people like him to go around basically inciting hatred, and essentially inciting all the kind of things that we try so hard in the European Union to oppose,” Tannock said.
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Administrator @ June 2, 2006