Staggeringly Wrong: Iran Takes Helm of UN Human Rights Council Social Forum

In the worst decision by an international body since the League of Nations looked at the rise of Adolf Hitler and said, “I’m sure everything will turn out fine,” the United Nations has handed the chairmanship of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum to Iran.

No joke: this Thursday, the Islamic Regime in Iran will become Chair of the U.N. Human Rights Council Social Forum.

Say NO to the U.N. legitimizing a regime that beats, blinds, tortures and rapes women for demanding their rights.

Sign the petition now: https://t.co/Q4HTtbCbgT pic.twitter.com/D8BxYtg6db

— UN Watch (@UNWatch) October 30, 2023

The purpose of this council? According to the UN Human Rights Council itself:

The Social Forum is an annual meeting convened by the Human Rights Council. It is a unique space for open and interactive dialogue between civil society, representatives of Member States, and intergovernmental organizations, on a theme chosen by the Council each year.

It’s important to note that the UN Human Rights Council doesn’t exactly have a stellar record. Members, as of this writing, include such bastions of liberty and individual rights as Rwanda, South Africa, Afghanistan, China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, and Russia. These are nations that, one might note, aren’t exactly holding any moral high ground where human rights are concerned.

Iran, though, as the chair of a prominent UN Human Rights Council meeting?

Iran has one of the worst records on human rights of all the nations on the planet. See Human Rights Watch’s 2023 report on Iran for full details, but here are some highlights:

• Iran routinely denies their people’s rights to freedom of expression or assembly. Peaceful protests (actually peaceful, not Antifa/BLM “peaceful”) are routinely met with force, sometimes lethal. As far as sharia restrictions, in 2022, at least one woman, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died in the custody of the morality police after being arrested for wearing an “improper” hijab.
• Human rights activists and others are routinely jailed, denied counsel, and in some cases held without trial for extended periods, including people from such an innocuous group as the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, who were charged with “cooperating with the hostile state of the U.S.”
• Iran is one of the worst abusers of capital punishment. “Crimes” deemed worthy of execution include apostasy, homosexuality, drinking of alcohol, and “insulting the Prophet.”
• Women and children have essentially no rights in Iran. Girls can be married off at age 13, earlier if approved by a judge. Iranian women cannot obtain a passport without written permission from a husband or father. Iran also has no laws prohibiting domestic abuse. Further, in 2021, Iran actually outlawed the distribution of contraceptives and sterilization (vasectomy or tubal ligation, among other methods.)

Iran has also funded and equipped proxy forces that are attacking U.S. personnel and installations in Syria as well as other places in the Middle East. Iran trained some of the Hamas terrorists that invaded Israel on October 7th. And finally, Iran is feeling its oats while the Israeli-Hamas war is underway, threatening a broader conflict if Israel continues to attack Hamas.

This is the nation that the United Nations has not only made a member of their Human Rights Council, but who is actually going to be chairing the Human Rights Council Social Forum. The United Nations has become a cruel joke perpetrated on the international community.

In a final data point, note that the UN is one of the voices that is shouting “continued violence is not the answer” in Gaza, when it has over the last month become manifestly apparent that violence is the only thing Hamas understands.

It’s past time that the United States withdrew from the United Nations.