Iran Chairs U.N. Human Rights Forum One Month After Hamas Atrocities

Iran, the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, will become the chair of the U.N. Human Rights Council Social Forum on Thursday — just one month after Iran’s clients in Hamas perpetrated some of the worst atrocities in modern history against Israeli civilians.

UN Watch noted that Iran was granted the rotating chairmanship of the U.N. human rights forum in May. The theme for the forum in 2023 is using technology to promote human rights. Only two days before it was handed the chairmanship, the medieval Iranian theocracy executed two men for the “crime” of discussing Islam’s human rights shortcomings on social media.

Six months later, Iran will assume the promised chairmanship after its terrorist proxy Hamas raped, tortured, murdered, and kidnapped more than 1,400 Israeli civilians.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW: Horror of the Hamas Terror Attack on Civilians at Kibbutz Be’eri in Israel

Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

UN Watch has collected 90,000 signatures on a petition to overturn the absurd Iranian chairmanship. Its last-ditch drive to collect more signatures features a video posted to social media of Executive Director Hillel Neuer asking the U.N. to justify naming “a regime that beats, blinds, tortures, and rapes women who demand their rights”:

In addition to the Hamas atrocities, Iran’s ascension to chair a human rights forum is ill-timed because another young woman was just killed for supposedly violating its hijab law, an incident Neuer alluded to in the clip above.

The victim was a 16-year-old girl named Armita Geravand, who was evidently assaulted and kidnapped by the “morality police” shortly after boarding a train on October 1. As with the murder of Mahsa Amini in 2022 for a similar hijab “offense,” Geravand’s family was compelled to tell state media interviewers that their daughter randomly collapsed for no reason and struck her head.

Video of the incident was deliberately obscured by bystanders and suppressed by the Iranian government, but one clip that escaped to the outside world showed Geravand boarding the train without wearing a hijab. Independent journalists reported Geravand was confronted by the thuggish “morality police” on board the train, and one of them shoved her hard enough to strike her head against a metal object.

Geravand slipped into a coma from her head trauma and never awakened. Iranian state media reported her death on Saturday. 

Amini’s death at the hands of the morality police in 2022 inspired some of the largest uprisings to date against the brutal Iranian regime, which suppressed the protests with a violent crackdown that should, by itself, disqualify Tehran from holding a seat on any human rights council.

Iran was evicted from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (UNCSW) in December 2022 as a consequence of Amini’s murder. The regime in Tehran has not accepted responsibility for Amini’s death, brought her killers to justice, or implemented any human rights reforms since then. On the contrary, it has imposed even more oppressive hijab laws and more brutal enforcement.

“It’s time for all democracies at the UN to stop legitimizing murderous regimes, in violation of the world body’s founding principles, and instead to begin holding the perpetrators to account,” Neuer said on Monday.

He continued:

These appointments send the wrong message at the wrong time, enabling the Islamic Republic of Iran – even as it is shooting protesters in the face, raping human rights defenders in prison, and sponsoring Hamas atrocities – to strut on the international stage as a respected and influential actor.

EVIL: See the Aftermath of Hamas Attack on an Israeli KINDERGARTEN

Joel B. Pollak / Breitbart News

Neuer pointed out that Iranian state media has been trumpeting its chairmanship of the U.N. forum as a historic triumph in a bid to “dishearten, dispirit, and demoralize dissidents.”

The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Michele Taylor, said in May that the United States was “appalled” that “a country with such a deplorable human rights record” would be given the chairmanship of a forum. 

Taylor said the appointment gave unwarranted legitimacy to the Iranian regime and also squandered the credibility of UNHRC and its Social Forum:

This year’s purported focus on the role of science, technology, and innovation in promoting post-pandemic human rights rings hollow and deeply troubling in light of this appointment. It is abhorrent that Iran, notorious for exploiting these very tools to suppress human rights and curb freedom of expression, would serve at the helm of this or any human rights-related event.

On October 19, the European Union posthumously awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, its highest human rights honor, to Mahsa Amini and the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement her death inspired. On Thursday, the regime that killed her and used murderous violence to crush the Woman, Life, Freedom movement is scheduled to assume the chairmanship of a United Nations panel on human rights.