UN Appoints Iran to Women’s Rights Panel

UN facing scrutiny over letting Iran join women’s rights panel.

The United Nations is facing growing scrutiny in the wake of Iran’s election to a top committee on women’s rights within the organization.

“We consider the election of the extremely misogynistic regime of Iran as an insult to all Iranian women, the main victims of this regime during the last four decades,” the Association of Iranian Women in France said in a statement released with their counterparts in Italy and Sweden.

“We call on governments, institutions and associations to condemn this decision,” the statement continued.

“A regime that does not allow women to make decisions for their own bodies has been elected to a body to monitor the condition of women around the world,” Masih Alinejad, a US-based women’s activist, said in testimony before the Swedish parliament.

“A regime that treats women as 2nd class citizens, jails them for not wearing compulsory hijab, bans them from singing, bars them from stadiums & doesn’t let them travel abroad without the permission of their husbands gets elected to UN’s top women’s rights body,” she continued, noting the nation’s stringent rules on women.

Last Tuesday, the UN’s Economic and Social Council elected Iran — along with China, Japan, Lebanon and Pakistan — to the Commission on the Status of Women, the principal team handling “the promotion of gender equality and the empowerment of women.”

China and Japan were already commission members, and last week’s vote marked their re-elections.

After the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iranian women were stripped of rights.

Women are not permitted by the government to have certain jobs, and must remain covered in public as a result of mandatory headscarf laws.

Daughters are under the supervision of their fathers, and wives are to follow the orders of their husbands. This means not going outdoors without spousal permission.