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The United Nations Human Rights Council voted on Thursday to appoint an independent inquiry into Iran’s deadly crackdown on protests, a motion cheered by activists amid a tightening crackdown in the Kurdish region in recent days.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk had earlier demanded that Iran stop its “excessive” use of force to suppress protests that erupted after the Sept. 16 death in custody of 22-year-old Kurdish woman Masha Amini.
The protests were particularly focused on women’s rights — Amini was detained by morality police for dressing deemed inconsistent with Iran’s Islamic dress code — but also called for the resignation of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The unrest has become one of the boldest challenges to Iran’s civilian ruling elite since the Islamic Revolution came to power in 1979, even as authorities suppressed previous rounds of major protests.
The delegation voted by the Human Rights Commission on Thursday will gather evidence of abuses by authorities during a deadly crackdown. Evidence collected by a delegation appointed by the same committee was later used to prosecute a former Syrian military officer stationed in Germany accused of war crimes.
Khadijeh Karimi, Tehran’s representative at the Geneva conference, earlier accused Western countries of using the human rights commission against Iran, a move she called “shocking and disgraceful”.
Thursday’s vote was seen as a test of the West’s influence in the council, with China pushing an amendment at the last minute to drop the probe, but it passed easily.
Turk said Iran was facing a “full-scale human rights crisis” with 14,000 arrests, including children, and he said Tehran had not responded to his request to visit the country.
Iran did not give a death toll for the protesters, but Ali Bagheri Kani, deputy foreign minister, said Thursday that about 50 police officers were killed and hundreds were injured in the unrest – a security concern. The first official figures for the death toll of troops.
He did not say whether the figure also included deaths from other security forces, such as the Bassij or Revolutionary Guards.
suppress
The crackdown has been particularly intense in the Kurdish region in western Iran, where UN human rights monitors this week noted reports of 40 deaths in the past week.
A lawmaker from the predominantly Kurdish city of Mahabad said he had received multiple summonses from the judiciary for supporting the protesters’ stance.
Jalal Mahmoudzadeh tweeted on Wednesday: “The judiciary lodged a complaint against me as a representative of mourners instead of upholding the legal rights of protesters and families of victims in Mahabad and Kurdish cities.”
Molawi Abdulhamid, a prominent Sunni Muslim cleric who is a member of the Baloch minority in the southeast, has been an outspoken critic of the treatment of the Sunni minority by the predominantly Shiite ruling elite In a national way, he opposed the repression.
“Dear Kurds in Iran are suffering from severe racial discrimination, severe religious pressure, poverty and economic hardship, just to respond to their protest with war bullets?” he tweeted on Wednesday.
Several Sunni religious scholars from the northwestern city of Urmia released a video posted by activist HRANA news agency in support of the protests and called for the release of prisoners and an end to the killing of demonstrators. Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the video.
The U.S. has imposed sanctions on three Iranian security officials over a crackdown in the Kurdish-majority region, the U.S. Treasury Department said on Wednesday.
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