The Case for Canada’s Listing of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)

July 2024

Preface

• For the last 45 years the Western world has attempted to entice the Islamic Republic of Iran into forgoing or at least tempering its ideological malevolence towards the international community and its own citizenry – even as the regime responded unfailingly with ever greater malevolence. 

• But over the last few years, the spectacle of the Iranian people confronting their tormentors on the streets of Iran and the regime’s continued commission and sponsorship of acts of extreme violence across the globe, is forcing the West to consider more efficacious measures to hold the regime to account and to protect Western countries from the ravages of the terrorist foreign policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

• Consequently, there has been increasing focus in the West on the necessity of designating Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) as a banned terrorist entity. The IRGC is the multi-billion-dollar engine driving the regime’s ascendance as the world’s most egregious state sponsor of terrorism and one of the planet’s most brutal violators of human rights within and beyond its own borders.

• The gravity of the threat to the international community demands that the West fully employ its arsenal of legal weapons to deter, impair, and delegitimize this entity, as so many experts, Iranian expats and dissidents, elected officials, NGOs and multiple other constituencies have demanded, and that this sui generis entity be added to  the list of banned terrorist organizations. 

• This document is intended to provide an up-to-date overview of the IRGC’s impeccable terrorist credentials; to outline the gravity of the IRGC threat to Canada and the West; and to provide answers to the main questions often proffered by those opposed to or concerned about Canada’s recent designation of the IRGC as a terrorist entity. 

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