Tehran: UN rights report product of West's political mandate to demonize Iran

Iran’s permanent representative to the United Nations office in Geneva says a new report by the world body on the situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic is the product of a political mandate devised by certain Western states to mount pressure on the country.

Esmaeil Baghaei Hamaneh made the remarks in an address to the 47th session of the Human Rights Council on Tuesday, after UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet presented the anti-Iran report.

Iran's representative said the report is full of inaccurate information and false narratives and the methodology used for compiling it is impeccably based on over-generalizing individual cases, magnifying negatives, minimizing positives and catastrophizing the whole situation.

“The report presented today is based on an entirely political mandate initiated by a group of like-minded, or rather similarly-biased, countries that have for long instrumentalized human rights as part and parcel of their adversarial agenda against Iran. The product of such prejudicial mandate is unavoidably biased toward reinforcing the prejudices,” he added.

“The report is one of the four yearly reports -- all similar in content, theme and tone -- originating from a mentality that is far from good faith — compiled inevitably to satisfy the mandate devised by a few Western States to pressurize and demonize Iran.”

Bachelet claimed that the report “found a disturbing human rights landscape for Iranian women and men of every religious faith, ethnic origin, social class and other status.”

Baghaei Hamaneh stressed that the Islamic Republic is fully committed to the protection and promotion of human rights and respects its international obligations, adding that unfair pressure and baseless allegations could not dissuade Tehran from continuing its path.

All world countries should consider the principles of universality, objectivity and non-selectivity regarding human rights issues and eliminate double standards and politicization, he said. “We also call upon all who truly care for human rights to recognize the imperative of rule of law and the centrality of judicial systems in preserving the rule of law and protecting human rights."

He also said the participation of the Iranian people in the June 18 elections to choose a new president and representatives to the City and Village Councils “showcased their determination to exercise their constitutional rights and secure the country’s democratic processes.”

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The Iranian diplomat further denounced the cruel unilateral coercive sanctions imposed against the nation by the administration of former US president Donald Trump following its unilateral withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal.

Iranians, he noted, exercised maximum resilience in the face of the so-called “maximum pressure” campaign initiated by America’s obsessive addiction to unilateralism and its hostility toward Iran.

“The US continues to carry on with the unlawful and inhuman legacy of the former administration in complete defiance of international law and basic principles of humanity. We should never forget that the US even tightened its unilateral sanctions during the pandemic leaving no doubt as to their true intention to immiserate a whole nation, in bold disrespect to the ICJ's ruling of 3 October 2018 which ordered the US to remove any impediment to export foodstuffs, medicine and medical devices to Iran,” Baghaei Hamaneh said.

Almost three years ago, The Hague-based International Court of Justice reprimanded the US over its re-imposition of illegal sanctions on Iran, ordering Washington to lift restrictive measures linked to humanitarian trade, food, medicine and civil aviation.

“The US and its enablers and those states that have been enforcing its unilateral coercive measures must be held to account for the massive systematic and gross violations of human rights. The United States is allegedly one of the major advocates of this reporting scheme and I leave it to my audience to make their judgment if an imposer of such atrocious unilateral coercive measures can logically claim to care for the human rights of the Iranians?!” the Iranian envoy said.

“Despite all the misgivings, Iran, as always, didn’t hesitate to try in all good faith to correct a host of disinformation, false claims and unsubstantiated allegations mentioned in the report. We wished that Iran’s responsible and professional approach would have been reciprocated by the report compilers who, instead, opted to ignore the overwhelming majority of our 60-page comment and clarification.”

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