ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Iran on Tuesday criticized as politically motivated a United Nations report that described the human rights situation in the Islamic Republic as “disturbing.”
"The report presented today is based on an entirely political mandate initiated by a group of like-minded, or rather 'similarly-biased', countries that have long instrumentalized human rights as part and parcel of their adversarial agenda against Iran," Esmail Baghaei Hamaneh, Tehran’s envoy to the United Nations Human Rights Council, told the council on Tuesday.
The UN Secretary-General’s report on human rights in Iran over the past year concluded that, while Iran is facing deteriorating conditions under economic sanctions and the coronavirus pandemic, “authorities have shown no willingness to adopt meaningful reforms,” stated the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet.
“Overall, the report finds a disturbing human rights landscape for Iranian women and men of every religious faith, ethnic origin, social class and other status,” she said.
The report highlighted concerns over the use of torture and ill-treatment in detention centres, intimidation, arbitrary detention, and prosecution of protesters and civil society actors, especially minorities, and the use of the death penalty.
Iran has executed at least 362 people in 2020 and the first half of 2021, including at least 69 Kurds put to death on “vaguely defined charges,” said Bachelet. There are also more than 80 child offenders on death row, four of them at risk of imminent execution.
This week, Amnesty International made an appeal for Iran to halt the scheduled June 28 execution of 20-year-old Hossein Shahbazi who was convicted of a murder committed when he was 17 years old. His conviction was obtained based on confessions made under torture, according to Amnesty.
“Using the death penalty against someone who was a child at the time of the crime is prohibited under international human rights law and violates Iran’s international obligations. Going ahead with this execution would be an abhorrent assault on children’s rights and would make an absolute mockery of justice,” said Diana Eltahawy, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East.
Tehran’s envoy Hamaneh said the UN report was not prepared in good faith. He said the United States, which unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed harsh sanctions on Iran, is one of the driving forces behind the criticism of Iran’s human rights record. The report is “compiled inevitably to satisfy the mandate devised by a few Western states to pressurize and demonize Iran,” he said, adding that the government is committed to protecting human rights and fulfilling its international obligations.
International monitors are concerned that human rights could further erode in Iran under President-elect Ebrahim Raisi who played a role in a 1988 prison massacre.
Raisi has defended his record. “All that I have done through my years of service has always been towards defending human rights,” he said in a press conference on Monday.
