UN ‘rights’ debate's guest list betrays anti-Iran agenda
The United Nations Human Rights Council bars all Iran-based NGOs from a so-called interactive debate, instead repeating a pattern of populating the session with anti-Iran elements.
The debate with Javaid Rehman, the UN’s so-called special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, was held in Geneva on Tuesday.
The composition of the invitees lacked any representative from the human rights non-governmental organizations that are headquartered in the Islamic Republic.
Iranian officials and pundits explained how the Council had repeated a pattern of excluding all the Iran-based bodies, while leaving the door open to “counterrevolutionary elements and fugitive criminals.”
They noted that the debate, which takes place each year following the release of a slur-ridden and radically-biased report by the rapporteur on the issue of human rights in Iran, had shunned the Iranian outfits despite initially approving of their participation.
This, the experts bemoaned, has made the debate that is supposed to give voice to all, a venue that just plays host to a circle exclusively comprising the anti-Iran figures, the rapporteur, and representatives of European countries, who similarly take the Islamic Republic under a barrage of unfounded accusations.
Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh, Iran’s permanent ambassador to the UN office in Geneva, who had joined the debate, underlined the unrepresentative identities of its guests.
“This is not interactive; it is counteractive to the promotion and protection of human rights. Nor is it truly a debate; it is a one-sided and accusatory disputation in which the sponsors set the terms of reference to arrive, uncontested, at the conclusions they preordained,” he said.
He also lashed out against Rehman’s report, finding fault with his very mandate and the contents of the misrepresenting document.
“The mandate comes from a non-consensual resolution forced upon the Council by a few political actors who are long fixated in their habitual confrontational thinking pattern with Iran … A mandate which is flawed by default can hardly yield a credible outcome other than profiling a country on the basis of generalization of individual cases, disinformation and false narratives,” the Iranian official said.
He berated the so-called rapporteur for alleging in his report that women were being treated in Iran as “second-class citizens,” producing concrete evidence to the contrary, and belied the report’s allegations against the Islamic Republic’s COVID-19 response.
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