Public Diplomacy Section, Consulate General of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hong Kong & Macao：Press Statement on 23 June 2025

【明報文章】In the early hours of Saturday, June 21st, the United States committed a grave act of aggression against the sovereignty of the Islamic Republic of Iran by targeting its nuclear facilities safeguarded under International Atomic Energy Agency —an act that constitutes a flagrant violation of Article 2(4) of the United Nations Charter, and breaches the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocol I (1977), which protects peaceful nuclear installations. These violations were carried out in coordination with the Israeli regime—a non-party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) that maintains an undeclared and unsafeguarded nuclear arsenal. The United States, the only country to have used nuclear weapons in human history, now collaborates with a nuclear-armed state outside the NPT framework to target a non-nuclear NPT party, thereby compounding violations of international humanitarian law and undermining the foundational norms of the global non-proliferation regime.

The U.S. president has failed to present any legal justification, let alone valid, for this violation of Iran’s sovereignty. By carrying out this attack, the U.S. has officially declared itself the instigator of war.

This brazen aggression has directly positioned the U.S. as the aggressor. In response, Iran has declared its inherent right to self-defense under Article 51 on the UN Charter and is committed to defending its sovereignty and population.

This attack constitutes not only a grave escalation but a direct assault on the integrity of the international legal order and the non-proliferation regime. Far from an isolated breach, it reflects a sustained pattern of unlawful conduct that flagrantly disregards foundational principles of the UN Charter and international humanitarian law. The systematic and deliberate nature of these violations evidences the de facto abandonment by Western powers of the rules-based international system, supplanting it with a doctrine of unilateral force, strategic impunity, and the normalization of lawlessness in pursuit of geopolitical objectives.

Following the unlawful act of aggression, Donald Trump declared, “Now is the time for peace”—a statement that epitomizes the cynical manipulation of language in Western political discourse, where the unlawful use of force is rebranded as a gesture of peace. Similarly, the German Chancellor’s recent admission—“We have delegated the dirty work to Israel”—lays bare the West’s strategic outsourcing of internationally condemned acts to its colonial proxy in West Asia.

When aerial bombardments, extrajudicial killings, destruction of civilian infrastructure, and acts of war are euphemistically labeled as “dirty work,” and not condemned but operationalized through the Zionist entity, the West’s systematic disregard for international legal order become undeniable.

It is this very rhetoric that has been used to justify wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Lebanon, and beyond—leaving behind nothing but instability, insecurity, and bloodshed. The genocide in Palestine remains one of the darkest examples of Zionist barbarity in human history and its Western enablers.

Peace cannot be built on aggression, genocide, and attacks against sovereign nations. If it could, we would have witnessed peace in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Libya, and Yemen over the past decades. Netanyahu’s recent slogan—”Power brings peace”—is the same deception that Western leaders have perpetuated for years, plunging the world into endless conflict while it continues to burn in the fires of war.

These narratives and actions will have profound strategic repercussions—politically, legally, economically, and security-wise—not only in West Asia but across the globe. There must be a national, regional, and global mobilization among governments, intellectuals, civil society, and peace-seeking institutions to condemn military aggression and destabilizing actions, ensuring that all violators of international law are held accountable.

[Public Diplomacy Section, Consulate General of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hong Kong & Macao]

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