By Jubin Katiraie
On Thursday, November 14, the United Nations adopted its 66th resolution condemning Iran’s systematic and ongoing human rights violations. Eighty-four nations expressed their concerns about the human rights conditions in Iran through their affirmative votes.
The resolution warns about “the widespread and systematic use of arbitrary arrests and detention, the case of suspicious deaths in custody, the poor conditions of prisons, the practice of deliberately denying prisoners access to adequate medical treatment, which creates a consequent risk of death,”
The UN resolution continues that the “suppression of “the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including in digital contexts, and the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly” and “discrimination and other human rights violations against women,
“Including the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly and the right to freedom of expression and opinion, harassment, intimidation and persecution of political opponents, human rights defenders, women’s and minority rights defenders, labor and trade union activists, students’ rights defenders, environmentalists, academics, film-makers, journalists, bloggers, social media users and social media page administrators, media workers, religious leaders, artists, lawyers, including human rights lawyers, and their families and persons belonging to recognized and unrecognized religious minorities and their families,”
And “discrimination and other human rights violations against persons belonging to ethnic, linguistic or other minorities, including but not limited to Arabs, Azeris, Balochis, Kurds and Turkmen, and their defenders.”
The 66th UN resolution also reflects the member states’ concerns at the alarmingly high frequency of the imposition and carrying-out of the death penalty, in violation of its international obligations, including:
Execution of persons based on forced confessions;
The imposition of the death penalty for crimes that do not qualify as severe crimes in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights;
Continuous the imposition death penalty against minors in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child;
Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), welcomed the adoption of this UN resolution.
Welcoming the adoption of the 66th UN censure of the #HumanRights violations in #Iran, I emphasize that impunity for the clerical regime leaders must end & they must be prosecuted. #NoImpunity4Mullahshttps://t.co/9XeGohMmPh pic.twitter.com/Wc0p9rIa24
— Maryam Rajavi (@Maryam_Rajavi) November 14, 2019
“Those responsible for the majority of the crimes to which the resolution has referred are the very people who have been continuously perpetrating a crime against humanity for the past four decades, in particular, the 1988 massacre of political prisoners,” Mrs. Rajavi said.
Mrs. Rajavi noted that although this resolution has failed to address many aspects of the flagrant violations of human rights in Iran, it nevertheless makes it palpably clear that the theocracy ruling Iran is the most barbaric and egregious abuser of human rights in the world today.
