The administration makes a good move.
Vice President Kamala Harris said that the U.S. and its partners will push for Iran’s removal from the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women, in a statement released this afternoon.
“Iran has demonstrated through its denial of women’s rights and brutal crackdown on its own people that it is unfit to serve on this Commission; Iran’s very presence discredits the integrity of its membership and the work to advance its mandate,” she said in the statement, just ahead of a U.S.-organized U.N. meeting on the protests sweeping that country.
The mass demonstrations were sparked by the apparent murder of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian woman from the country’s Kurdish region who died in custody of the Iranian morality police. Witnesses to the incident claim that they saw officers beat Amini in a police van, after she was arrested over her failure to wear a hijab properly. Iranian security forces have responded to the subsequent demonstrations with violence.
“To all those protesting I say again, we see you and we hear you. I am inspired by your bravery, as are people around the world,” Harris continued, vowing to “hold accountable the Iranian officials and entities responsible for the violence against protestors.”
The U.N. commission, charged with promoting women’s empowerment and gender equality, encompasses 45 member states elected to four-year terms.
Iran won election to the commission last year, even as human-rights advocates warned that its presence on the commission would be farcical, given the theocratic regime’s repressive policies targeting women. That led many to speculate that Iran had been elected with the support of certain European democracies, and the watchdog group U.N. Watch said that at least five of those countries had supported Tehran’s bid for the commission.
At the time, the Biden administration was negotiating a return to the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, and the U.S. issued statements that seemed to criticize, indirectly, Iran’s election to the commission.
A spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the U.N. told National Review in April 2021:
Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield believes the unopposed candidacies of countries that engage in torture, abuse, and violations of human rights and due process was a troubling feature of this election. That’s why the United States called for the vote on the Commission on the Status of Women, specifically to allow countries to register their opposition. The United States supports candidates in the UN system that seek to contribute positively to its work and mission and reinforce the foundational values of the UN system, including human rights. We continue to call on regional groups to put forward candidates with strong human rights records for these UN bodies.
The administration’s new effort to remove Iran from the commission is encouraging, but it should have done more to block the country’s election in the first place, former State Department official Gabriel Noronha told NR.
“The Biden administration did not object when Iran was first elected to the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women last April. There is no evidence they tried to persuade any of the European nations who voted for Iran’s membership,” he said, calling it “encouraging that 18 months later they are now taking steps to remedy this mistake.”