Official says country is in ‘fully fledged human rights crisis’ as fact-finding mission launched
The UN’s human rights council has voted overwhelmingly to set up a fact-finding investigation into human rights abuses in, where an estimated 300 people have been killed and 14,000 arrested since protests began 10 weeks ago.
Iran has been rocked by more than two months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested by the morality police for supposedly wearing her hijab inappropriately. The Iranian authorities have said their inquiry showed she died from natural causes due to a pre-existing condition. Her family allege she was beaten.
The UN has never set up such a powerful mechanism in respect of Iran before. Western powers have been imposing asset freezes and travel bans on individual security agents behind the repression, but in practice these sanctions have little impact. In an attempt to preempt any international inquiry, Iran’s interior minister, Ahmad Vahidi, announced on Monday that it was setting up “an investigation committee to pursue the rights of the victims of the recent incidents and riots”.
He said: “Civil society actors have been targeted and arrested from their homes and workplaces, among them human rights defenders, journalists and lawyers. Arrested protesters continue to be denied access to a lawyer. Many face national security charges with lengthy prison sentences”. The UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Javaid Rehman, accused the judiciary of covering up crimes by security forces, and said structural impunity had fuelled widespread patterns of unlawful killing.
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