Outrage as Iran Elected to U.N. Committee on Human Rights, Terrorism

The United Kingdom, along with Australia, France and Canada — and indeed, nearly the entire 54-member Economic and Social Council of the United Nations — disgraced itself by throwing its support behind Iran and voting to elect the authoritarian regime to the U.N. Committee for Program and Coordination.

The committee works on such issues as gender equality and women’s empowerment, human rights, disarmament and preventing terrorism. In a case of real life imitating satire, the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism and one of the world’s worst human rights abusers has just been elected to sit on a committee that is supposed to fight terrorism and protect human rights.

The United States stood alone in opposing the decision to seat Iran on the committee.

The decision is likely to hold because the U.N. General Assembly typically allows these votes to go through without casting its own vote on the issue.

The decision drew immediate fire from critics, who pointed out that last year, Iran executed an average of four people every day and tramples on the human rights of women and minorities.

If the regime “survives the current crisis, there is a serious risk that executions will be used even more extensively as a tool of oppression and repression,” said Iran Human Rights (based in Norway) and Together Against the Death Penalty (based in Paris) in a joint report on last year’s executions.

Amnesty International said that women and minorities face “systemic discrimination and violence.” The group added, “Authorities intensified their crackdown on women who defied compulsory veiling laws, the Baha’i community, and Afghan refugees and migrants. Thousands were arbitrarily detained, interrogated, harassed and/or unjustly prosecuted for exercising their human rights.”

Amnesty also said that the Iranian authorities applied the death penalty “arbitrarily.”

Zac Goldsmith, a Conservative member of the House of Lords, blasted his country for the decision, calling it “mind boggling.”

“On every international issue this U.K. government has not only made the wrong call – it has made a catastrophically wrong call,” he said.

“Actively voting to put Iran on a U.N. committee responsible for tackling gender equality and empowerment of women, disarmament, human rights, terrorism prevention … It is actually mind-boggling,” he added.

In his blistering condemnation, Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, said the vote could have gone differently, as it had with Russia.

“By their cynical actions at the U.N., major Western states have betrayed their own human rights principles, severely undermining the ruled-based international order that they claim to support,” he said.

“We note that Western states did take action in recent years to stop Russia from getting elected to similar … bodies, and we deeply regret that they failed to do the same now to stop the election of serial violators such as Iran, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia and Sudan,” he added.