HRC agrees fact-finding mission to investigate Tehran's suppression of protests following Mahsa Amini's death
In opening the meeting, UN human rights chief Volker Turk told the Council that 14,000 people had been arrested and that “hundreds of university students have been summoned for questioning, threatened or suspended and barred from entering university campuses.”
Today, the Human Rights Council (HRC), the UN’s preeminent human rights body, accepted by a large margin the creation of a fact-finding mission to investigate Tehran’s brutal repression of the mass protests that have engulfed Iran since the death at the hands of the “morality police” of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman accused of wearing her hijab improperly. Her death has prompted an unprecedented wave of protest across the country and worldwide condemnation.
Proposed by Germany and Iceland, the resolution establishing the fact-finding mission was voted for overwhelmingly by 25 to 6, with 16 abstentions. The vote was seen here as an important test of the Council’s credibility after China and its allies were able to vote against a draft decision to discuss the situation in the Xinjiang province. The illustrated and annotated map of today’s vote complied by the KAS Foundation can be found here. (Full disclosure: The KAS foundation supports The G|O.)
Germany’s foreign minister Annalena Baerbock travelled to Geneva to address the UN body in person. Germany is not singling out Iran, she said, but simply asking the country to abide by its obligations under international law.
In opening the meeting, UN human rights chief Volker Turk told the Council that 14,000 people had been arrested and that “hundreds of university students have been summoned for questioning, threatened or suspended and barred from entering university campuses.”
Turk warned that “The old methods and the fortress mentality of those that wield power simply do not work; in fact, they only exacerbate the situation. We are now in a fully-fledged human rights crisis,” he said.
Applause greeted the passage of the resolution. Human rights defenders consider the creation of the fact-finding mission a milestone, as the newly created mechanism paves the way for possible prosecution before international courts. Sanctions imposed on Iran so far have had little effect on the regime.
“Civil society actors have been targeted and arrested from their homes and workplaces, among them human rights defenders, journalists, and lawyers. Arrested protesters continue to be denied access to a lawyer. Many face national security charges with lengthy prison sentences,” Turk said.
In a statement illustrating the extreme polarization of the UN body, Russia’s Ambassador to Geneva told the Council: “Such initiatives have nothing to do with concern for human rights. Their goal is to stigmatize and pressure the ‘undesirable’ states under human rights pretexts. […] The main goal of the initiators of this special session is to adopt another politicized resolution for the sake of rocking the domestic political situation in Iran. The task of the Human Rights Council and its mechanisms is to support the States, not to conduct investigations.”
Iran is unlikely to cooperate. Khadijeh Karimi, Tehran’s representative at the Geneva meeting, accused Western states of using the Council to target Iran, a move she called “appalling and disgraceful.”
-PHM