The Iranian Foreign Ministry has summoned the British envoy to Tehran, Hugo Shorter, over the anti-Iran positions recently adopted by senior British officials.
In a statement released on Friday, the ministry said the British envoy was summoned to protest against senior British officials’ “baseless claims” about Iran and their accusations that Tehran “seeks to interfere in Britain’s internal affairs.”
At the meeting, Alireza Yousefi, assistant foreign minister and the ministry’s director general for Western Europe, stressed that the British officials’ “biased positions and baseless claims” against Iran were “in contradiction with the international law principles and regulations as well as the diplomatic norms,” and would increase the Iranian people’s distrust of Britain’s policies towards their country and the West Asia region.
He called on the British government to reconsider and revise its “unconstructive” approaches towards the Iranian nation.
The British ambassador said he would convey Iran’s protest to his government.
Britain announced on Tuesday that it would require the Iranian state to register everything it does to exert political influence in the UK, subjecting Tehran to an elevated tier of scrutiny in light of what it said was increasingly aggressive activity.
On Thursday, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei rejected the accusations “absurd.”
“It is absurd to blame Iran for something you excel in and master: illegal interference in other nations’ internal affairs!” he wrote in a post on his X account.
Addressing parliament on Wednesday, UK security minister Dan Jarvis announced that he would put Iran’s state, its security services and the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps into the enhanced tier of an upcoming registration scheme designed to protect against covert foreign influence.