Iran: UN and West want to end crackdown, Tehran points to ‘lack of trust’

The bloody crackdown on demonstrations rocking Iran “must stop,” the UN and Western countries are demanding this Thursday. The UN Human Rights Council must decide whether to launch an international investigation into the violations that Tehran is accused of. “The Iranian people are crying out for something so simple that most of us take for granted: the opportunity to speak up and be heard,” US Ambassador Michelle Taylor told her delegation, waving photos and the names of the victims.

The 47 member states of the UN’s highest human rights body are urgently discussing the “deterioration of the human rights situation” at the initiative of Germany and Iceland. “The necessary and disproportionate use of force must stop. The old methods and mentality of the besieged fortress of the powers that be simply do not work. In fact, they only make the situation worse,” said UN human rights chief Volker Türk. He denounced those who “seek to delegitimize protesters, civil society representatives and journalists and present them as agents in the service of enemies and foreign states”, calling these methods “routine narrative of tyranny”.

416 deaths and 15,000 arrests in two months

According to the Norwegian-based NGO Iran Human Rights (IHR), at least 416 people, including 51 children, have died in the crackdown in two months. More than 15,000 people have been arrested, according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Iran. Iranian justice has already handed down six death sentences in connection with the demonstrations. This wave of protest, generated by the demands on women after the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for wearing the wrong Islamic veil, and turned into a challenge to the authorities, is unprecedented since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Council must decide on the appointment of a high-level team of investigators to investigate all human rights violations related to the suppression of demonstrations. According to the draft resolution submitted by Germany and Iceland, this independent international fact-finding mission, which has little chance of reaching Iran, will have to collect evidence of violations and store it in such a way that it can be used. for possible prosecution in the future. Volker Türk also indicated that he did not receive a response from Iran to his offer to visit the country.

“The so-called human rights activists”

Tehran, the capital of Iran, for its part, is struggling to find enough allies to thwart the resolution. Iranian spokeswoman Khadija Karimi accused Western countries of “lack of moral authority” to lecture Iran by denouncing US and European sanctions. “The rights of the Iranian people are widely violated by so-called human rights defenders due to the imposition of unilateral sanctions by the US regime and the implementation of these harsh sanctions by European countries, especially Germany, Britain and France,” she said. added.

China, Venezuela and Cuba supported Iran, and Chinese Ambassador Chen Xu, as usual, defended “dialogue and cooperation (…) to promote and protect human rights.” Pakistan also stressed the importance of obtaining the consent of the country concerned to initiate an investigation. But Brazil, another leading developing country, has announced it will abstain from voting.

Within the walls of the Council, there is growing resistance, led by Russia, China or Iran, to attempts by Western democracies to condemn individual states for human rights violations. These countries suffered a bitter defeat last month when they attempted to include a discussion of China’s crackdown on Xinjiang on the Council’s agenda.