The United Nation’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) elected Iran to serve a 4-year term on the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) Wednesday despite Iran’s notorious record of women’s oppression.
“Electing Ayatollah Khamenei’s Islamic Republic of Iran to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” tweeted UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer.
The UN claims the CSW is “instrumental in promoting women’s rights, documenting the reality of women’s lives throughout the world, and shaping global standards on gender equality and the empowerment of women.”
Ironically, the UN Secretary-General released a 2020 report detailing Iran’s human rights abuses including its discrimination against women and girls “in law and practice, including with regard to family matters, freedom of movement, employment, culture and sports, as well as access to political and judicial functions.”
The Wednesday vote, which was first reported by UN Watch, was conducted under a secret ballot protocol through which Iran received 43 votes out of the 54-nation ECOSOC.
UN Watch has resolved that at least four democratic countries voted for Iran; although, the countries remain unidentified.
The four countries may include Australia, Austria, Bulgaria, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Latvia, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Swiss, United Kingdom, United States, or Portugal.
“This is surreal. A regime that treats women as 2nd class citizens, jails them for not wearing compulsory hijab, bans them from singing, bars them from stadiums and doesn’t let them travel abroad without the permission of their husbands gets elected to UN’s top women’s rights body,” said Iranian women’s rights activist Masih Alinejad.
In Iran’s legal system, the worth of a woman is only half of that of a man. If a woman appears as a witness in court, her testimony is only worth half of a man’s.
The decision was met by an uproar of comments and condemnation on social media, with human rights advocates and others questioning the designation and calling out the Iranian regime’s egregious human rights record, particularly against women and minorities.
Critics now await to see if the Biden administration or any of the democratic countries involved in the vote will publicly condemn Iran’s election to the CSW.
