France has announced that it would support the EU designating Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organisation, in a surprise U-turn amid secretive negotiations among the bloc's 27 member states.
Paris had appeared to be the last major holdout after Italy this week abandoned its traditional reluctance, followed by Spain.
Opponents had long argued that listing the IRGC could sever the remaining diplomatic channels with Iran − including sensitive negotiations over western detainees, whom European governments describe as hostages.
Now, the EU appears on track to achieving consensus on Thursday to list the IRGC − an elite military force with its own navy and air force that reports directly to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei − as a terror group.
“France will support the inclusion of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps on the European list of terrorist organisations,” Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said late on Wednesday, shortly after the office of President Emmanuel Macron announced the decision.
“The unbearable repression of the peaceful uprising of the Iranian people cannot go unanswered.”
Earlier in the day, in closed-door talks in Brussels, French diplomats had been reluctant to voice their support, sources told The National.
Yet Europeans were under pressure to take a strong stand amid reports that possibly tens of thousands of anti-government protesters were killed during recent demonstrations.
Ministers had already planned at a meeting on Thursday to issue 21 new sanctions against Iranian individuals and entities involved in the repression of protests that began last month.
Consensus needed
An IRGC terror designation has been routinely discussed, under pressure from the Iranian diaspora in Europe, each time there are mass killings in Iran.
Last-minute changes are always possible since the requirement on EU sanctions is that all 27 members support them.
Not all countries have made their position public. Speaking before the change of heart in Paris and Madrid, several EU diplomats said that four EU countries were against the listing, but only named France and Spain. “It’s highly sensitive and political,” one diplomat said.
“France could not be the only European power to prevent this listing of IRGC as a terrorist organisation. It was not possible,” Clement Therme, non-resident fellow at the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah) think tank, told The National.
“The priority for France is to show they are fighting against the impunity of the IRGC, the perpetrators of human rights violations and potentially crimes against humanity.
“Europeans are betting that if they are united and they can stick together, that will be difficult for the Iranian side to cut diplomatic relations with all European countries at the same time.”
France has two citizens living at its Tehran embassy after being freed from the notorious Evin Prison. There are also around 900 French citizens living in Iran.
Listing the IRGC opens the possibility for its victims to seek justice in European courts. It also allows for better management of the group's presence in Iranian cultural centres. Tehran is believed to send IRGC members posing as regular diplomats to monitor the activities of the Iranian diaspora in Europe. More than 300,000 Iranians live in Germany alone.
Western states have accused Iran of plotting murders against dissidents on their soil, which Tehran denies. There are numerous cases of European courts linking Iran to assassination plots. These include the 1992 assassination of four Iranian Kurds in a Berlin restaurant. In March 2024, a German court found that the Iranian state had ordered an arson attack against a synagogue in Dusseldorf two years earlier.
The EU has already listed the IRGC in its entirety under its weapons of mass destruction sanctions regime, meaning that it is under an asset freeze and EU citizens are prohibited from making funds and economic resources available.
Individuals and entities linked to the IRGC are also under sanctions for human rights breaches, supporting Russia's war on Ukraine and Iran's nuclear and ballistic programme.
