The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, says the Israel-Gaza War bolsters "repression" inside Iran by deflecting attention from internal criticism of the regime. 

The comments come as Iran prepares to chair the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum which will come into effect today, a move which has garnered global outrage.

"Given the current crisis, they [Iran] feel even more emboldened because they believe they have succeeded in diverting attention from internal criticism and internal repression, by becoming or claiming to have become virulent defenders... of the Palestinian movement," Rehman said at a roundtable hosted by the National Union for Democracy in Iran (NUFDI) in Washington Tuesday.

Iran-backed Hamas declared war on Israel on October 7, invading by air, land and sea, and killing 1,400 mostly civilians. Another 240 were kidnapped to Gaza including babies and the elderly.

The regime has since rallied its proxies in the region to support Hamas in Gaza, with military action coming from groups in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen since war broke out.

The UN Human Rights Rapporteur for Iran, who has never been allowed by the regime to visit the country since his appointment in July 2018, also pointed out that the leaders of the Islamic Republic had already been planning to intensify repression in the country before the war started.

Rehman also said the regime has “lost credibility” since the protests sparked by the death in custody of the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 that sparked protests across the country for months in the worst uprising since the 1979 revolution. Hundreds of civilians were killed by state security and tens of thousands more arbitrarily arrested, with dozens more executed.

“The problems with the existing constitutional and legal provisions are that they are subject to politically engineered criteria or the application of State ideology, which also results in the failure to engage in democratic dialogue and the inability to introduce incremental reforms,” Rehman said in his report to the UN General Assembly last week, adding that the situation had led to widespread public distrust and protests that were violently repressed.

In a letter to the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres earlier this week, Iran's Nobel Peace Laureate Narges Mohammadi urged the UN to cancel Iran's appointment to the chair of the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum.

“The religious fundamentalist regime of Iran opposes the foundations of democracy and human rights, especially women's rights, and sees its survival in internal repression as well as creating crisis and disrupting the stability, security and peace of the region and the world,” Mohammadi wrote in her letter.

“The presidency of such a regime over the UN Human Rights Council Social Forum which is a human rights supporting body is perplexing and disappointing,” she wrote, adding that it is expected that the Islamic Republic is “decisively and with clarity removed from this position.” 

Offering the position of chair also contradicts an investigation launched by the UN last year into the human rights abuses witnessed during crackdowns on protesters. The UN responded by saying "the chairmanship rotates regionally, in consistency with established UN procedures".