UN Human Rights Body Slams Iran And Backs Its Special Rapporteur
The UN Human Rights Council Tuesday adopted a resolution sharply criticizing the situation in Iran in the wake of a deadly crackdown on antigovernment protests.
The UN Human Rights Council Tuesday adopted a resolution sharply criticizing the situation in Iran in the wake of a deadly crackdown on antigovernment protests.
The HRC voted to accept the Report on the human rights situation Iran from its Special Rapporteur Javaid Rehman and extended Rehman’s reporting mandate by another twelve months.
Rehman was pleased with the result of Tuesday’s vote in the Council. Talking to Iran International after the vote, Rehman said he welcomed the strong vote accepting his Report’s findings and recommendations and extending his mandate.
Rehman said that the vote, stronger this year than in some previous years, showed that the Council recognized that what he called the “alarming and concerning” human rights situation in Iran had become much worse since the death of Mahsa Gina Amini than in the previous reporting period.
The Islamic Republic has been criticized by the UN rights body and international organizations defending human rights for decades. In the latest round of protests, security forces killed more than 500 civilians and arrested at least 20,000 based on estimates presented in detail by monitoring groups.
The Resolution’s summarized Rehman’s original report and its recommendations. These deplored the “widespread, repeated and persistent” violation of human rights in the Islamic Republic and called on Iran to end its “systematic impunity” and hold human rights violators accountable in line with international law.
The Resolution also called for Iran to stop discrimination and violence based on gender and ethnicity and belief. The Resolution expressed its “deep concerns” at the surge of executions and called on Iran to honor its own agreed legal obligations under international law and to halt all executions for offences “that do not meet the threshold of the most serious crimes or for alleged offences committed before the age of 18 years.”
Twenty-three countries, mostly in Europe, voted in favor of the Resolution; eight against, among which were China, Pakistan and Cuba. China justified its No vote on the grounds that it was always opposed to any interference in the internal affairs of states. Pakistan said the Resolution was politically driven and human rights investigations were “best done with the consent of their country concerned”.
This last point would make the Special Rapporteurs job redundant, since Iran has refused both to recognize or acknowledge the mandate given by the UN to the HRC’s Special Rapporteur. Eritrea, Kazakhstan , Vietnam, Bolivia and Bangladesh made up the refuseniks.
India and Qatar were among the 16 abstaining voters, which could both sit on their hands and yet let the Resolution pass. The abstainers included a bloc of sub-Saharan African states. Of these, South Africa said it recognized the part played by women in its own struggles for freedom and encouraged Iran to enhance its cooperation with the UN High Commission for Human Rights. But despite its concerns with what it called the ‘geo-politics’ of the Resolution, South Africa nevertheless did nothing to block the Resolution. Nor did India, which last time voted against the Special Rapporteur’s mandate being extended.
The Resolution, as with previous such resolutions, again “regretted” the refusal of Iran to allow Rehman into the country and called on Iran to cooperate with the Special Rapporteur and provide all information necessary “to allow the fulfilment of his mandate” … This last is what the UN calls its “standing invitation” to Iran to cooperate.
Iran’s UN ambassador Ali Bahreini was having none of it. Speaking in English shortly before today’s vote, Bahreini called the Resolution a “malign attempt” to “name and shame” the Islamic Republic. Bahreini said that the “weaponization of human rights as a foreign policy tool” was unacceptable and “endangers the common cause on human rights”.
The purpose of the Resolution, Bahreini claimed, was to “divert attentions from the violations of the rights of Iranians and crimes against humanity committed by the sponsors of this resolution through imposing nationwide unilateral coercive measures against Iran.”
This referred to sanctions imposed on Iran, a point raised in Rehman’s report which recognized the effects of sanctions on Iran’s health sector and called for exemptions in some areas. But, as Rehman argued in the Council, sanctions “should not be used to excuse violations of human rights”.
Iran has claimed that US economic sanction impede healthcare for its citizens, but in fact medicine is exempt and Iran has been importing annually around $3 billion dollars of medications and claims it is an exporter.
The Resolution voted through the funds for the Special Rapporteur’s mandate for a further year: at just under $500,000 for a twelve-month period covering all expenses, the post is not extravagant. Rehman now has to prepare a new Report by end of summer to be presented at the forthcoming UNGA in October.
The Resolution also calls for Rehman to work with the international independent fact-finding mission (FFM) on Iran, which itself is likely to prove another unwelcome pressure point on Tehran as it prepares its own report on alleged human rights violations there since the death of Gina Mahsa Amini on September 16, 2022. The FFM is due to present an oral update on its work to the Human Rights Council in June this year ahead of its comprehensive report to the HRC in March 2024.
The semi-official ISNA news agency reported midday local time that the warehouses belonged to Electrosteel, a large and well-known company in Iran.
"There are currently 100 firefighters at the scene. Due to the extent of the fire and thickness of the smoke, there is no information regarding potential victims," added ISNA.
60 fire trucks and water tankers arrived at the site to prevent the fire from spreading to the nearby warehouses and the gas tank of the factory.
According to fire department officials, the warehouses occupy an area of approximately 2,000 square meters and part of them were destroyed due to the large volume of the blaze.
The official cause of the blaze has not been announced yet.
There have been a number of explosions and fires near Iran’s military, nuclear and industrial facilities in recent years.
On January 28, a huge fire erupted at an Iranian military industry factory following a suspected drone strike in the central city of Esfahan.
Iran blamed Israel for the drone attack vowing revenge.
On the same day, another large blaze also engulfed an industrial area near the city of Tabriz, northwest Iran. The government said the fire started at a refinery producing motor oil.
The situation has been grave in the past several years but since the administration of Ebrahim Raisi assumed office in 2021, the entire energy management system is going haywire even faster, drawing backlash from people and even regime officials.
Iran has one of the biggest reserves of oil and natural gas and its economy is chiefly dependent on the revenues from crude oil exports. But due to sanctions and mismanagement it has failed to modernize its electricity sector and the country faces power shortages most of the year.
The regime has a hypocritical approach about the sales of fuel to foreign buyers. While it boasts about the growing level of sales, which mainly occur through vast networks of smugglers under the unofficial supervision of the Revolutionary Guards, it periodically claims to have stopped traffickers from smuggling some shipments of gasoline and diesel out of the country.
The oil-rich country has been facing a serious scarcity of gasoline in its domestic energy market because fuel is subsidized in Iran and much cheaper than in neighboring countries, which leads to small and large scale smuggling.
The country also faces gasoline and diesel shortages due to a lack of refining capacity, but millions of liters of fuel is smuggled out of Iran daily, which betrays a large-scale smuggling networks.
In a recently released video, Iranian lawmaker Malek Shariati said "Perhaps we are ashamed to admit that 1.5 billion liters of liquid fuel are smuggled from our power plants per year.” He added that the tankers carrying government-supplied cheap fuel are not unloaded at the power plants and documents are forged to cover for that. Even if the regulatory body finds out about it, the fine is so low that it is still worth it, Shariati noted, adding that most of the country’s diesel smuggling happens in power plants, implying that the owners of the power plants are responsible for the fuel smuggling in the country.
According to Mir-Ali-Ashraf Abdollah Pourihoseini, a former vice president of Ministry of Economic Affairs and head of the Iranian Privatization Organization, in recent years, many key power plants have been handed over to insider investors because the government did not have the needed budget to overhaul them. However, the new owners did not take any steps to overhaul the aging plants.
But who are these new owners? For instance, Abadan power plant with a capacity of 814 megawatts was handed over to the Headquarters of Imam's Directive, or simply Setad, parastatal organization under direct control of the Supreme Leader.
Zagros power plant with a capacity of 656 megawatts was handed over to the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs at the price of less than 8 trillion rials – or about $16 million dollars in today’s exchange rate. Khatam al-Anbiya Construction Headquarter -- the engineering arm of the IRGC – acquired Sabalan power plant with a 960-megawatt capacity at a price of about $8 million. The Armed Forces Pension Fund and Social Security Investment Company bought Gilan power plant, and the list goes on.
Public property has been “privatized” by giving away key infrastructure to powerful cliques of military men and bureaucrats who easily enrich themselves.
Moreover, In the budget bill for the current Iranian year, which started March 21, the government has granted new permits to some departments such as the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Islamic Republic to sell oil on behalf of the government and earn some of the income. Based on the legislation, the General Staff of the Armed Forces is allowed to export three billion euros worth of crude oil and oil products through small private refineries after the approval of the country's budget organization.
Iran, which is under US oil export sanctions, has used this method before to make illicit oil shipments. However, in the past this has led to large corruption cases.
A well-publicized scandal broke in 2013 when authorities arrested Babak Zanjani, a businessman, for embezzling at least $2.7 billion from illicit oil sales during international sanctions from 2009-2013. According to legal experts, this method of allocating money to government entities violates the constitution.
Many members of Iran's hardliner dominated parliament are former members of the IRGC. Moreover, the government has started a new privatization plan to sell public assets presumably to well-connected regime insiders. Iranian media and economic experts have characterized the new privatization plan by the government as "a plunder of public property" and "economic apartheid."