Tehran lambasts appointment of special rapporteur on Iran human rights

Qasemi made the remarks on October 22 while reacting to a recent report released by the UN so-called Special Rapporteur on the human rights situation in Iran Ahmed Shaheed that was presented to the 71st session of the UN General Assembly earlier this month.

In his latest report, Shaheed had reiterated his previous allegations about violations of human rights in Iran.

Qasemi said that the report was made based on a statement published in line with the political goals and intentions and foreign policies of certain countries.

He stressed that the report would by no means help promote human rights situation at the international level and would instead “lead to undermine global promotion of human rights” since the world public opinion has witnessed that “certain clear examples of human rights violations made by a number of countries and terrorist groups which are supported by those countries are ignored in the report.”

Voicing Tehran’s disapproval over appointment of a special rapporteur for human rights situation “in a country which has been committed to the rights of its citizens in accordance with its religious, legal and international norms,” Qasemi said providing reports about a country in the United Nations should be based on a “professional, fair, indiscriminative and un-politicized mechanism.”

“The UN Human Rights Council is established to prevent double standard policies and the mechanism of Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is set on the ground of equal responsibility of each country, therefore, the mechanism should not be undermined by making parallel actions such as releasing of statements by a number of states that acted in line with political intentions of certain Western governments,” the spokesman argued.

The UPR is a unique mechanism of the Human Rights Council (HRC) aimed at improving the human rights situation on the ground of each of the 193 United Nations (UN) Member States.

Although Tehran believes that appointing a special rapporteur for human rights situation in the country is not reasonable, it has “cooperated with the rapporteur (Shaheed) in line with the UN human rights system and in order to correct the report and help provide it based on reliable information.”

Qasemi regretted that despite Iran’s achievements in the field of human rights, the rapporteur used “ambiguous words” in his report and tried “to provide a distorted image of Iran’s human rights situation by expressing unreasonable concerns which were resulted from unreliable information.”

Tehran believes that promotion of human rights situation is a major issue for all members of the international community and will be only possible through cooperation, negotiations and an equal and indiscriminative approach,” Qasemi said adding, “To this end, Iran has had constructive cooperation with international human rights bodies and their counterparts in certain countries in form of bilateral dialogues in the field of human rights.”

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