Dozens of countries including the UK have made the “mind-boggling” decision to nominate Iran to join a UN committee responsible for shaping policy around human rights – despite the Islamic Republic last year carrying out the largest number of executions in almost four decades.
Iran will become a new member country on the UN’s Committee for Programme and Coordination after being selected by the body’s Economic and Social Council, which comprises 54 nations, including the UK, Australia, France and Canada. The US was the only country to object, on the basis that Iran – along with Cuba and Nicaragua, which were also elected to the committee – were “unfit”.
The committee is scheduled to meet next month, when it is due to discuss gender equality and women’s empowerment; human rights; disarmament; and terrorism prevention.
The selection will almost certainly be approved as the UN General Assembly typically rubber-stamps such nominations without a vote.
In 2025, the Iranian regime executed at least 1,639 people last year, averaging more than four people per day, according to a joint report from two human rights organisations, Norway-based Iran Human Rights and Paris-based Together Against the Death Penalty. The groups also warned that an even greater number of people could be executed this following mass protests in in the country in January.
If the regime "survives the current crisis, there is a serious risk that executions will be used even more extensively as a tool of oppression and repression", they said last week.
Amnesty International has previously noted in a separate report that in 2024 to 2025, women and girls, LGBTI people and ethnic and religious minorities in Iran experienced “systemic discrimination and violence”. It continued: “Authorities intensified their crackdown on women who defied compulsory veiling laws, the Baha’i community, and Afghan refugees and migrants. Thousands were arbitrarily detained, interrogated, harassed and/or unjustly prosecuted for exercising their human rights.”
The death penalty, it added, “was used arbitrarily".
Conservative peer Zac Goldsmith described the UK’s vote for Iran to sit on the committee as “mind-boggling”.
Writing on social media, he said: “On every international issue this UK government has not only made the wrong call – it has made a catastrophically wrong call.
“Actively voting to put Iran on a UN committee responsible for tackling gender equality and empowerment of women, disarmament, human rights, terrorism prevention ... It is actually mind-boggling.”
Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, a non-governmental organisation that monitors the UN, said: “By their cynical actions at the UN, major Western states have betrayed their own human rights principles, severely undermining the ruled-based international order that they claim to support.”
“We note that Western states did take action in recent years to stop Russia from getting elected to similar… bodies, and we deeply regret that they failed to do the same now to stop the election of serial violators such as Iran, China, China, Cuba, Nicaragua, Saudi Arabia and Sudan.”
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