(Resubmitted to remove the gibberish in paragraph 4 and make the paragraph’s second sentence begin with Tehran blaming “terrorists and rioters…”)
Authors: Emma Fudge and Olivia Le Poivin
GENEVA, Jan 23 (Reuters) – The United Nations human rights body condemned Iran on Friday for human rights abuses and ordered an investigation into a recent crackdown on anti-government protests that left thousands dead.
“I call on the Iranian authorities to reconsider, withdraw and end their brutal repression,” High Commissioner Volker Turk told an emergency session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, expressing concern for the detainees.
The committee passed a motion to extend a previous investigation set up in 2022 so that U.N. investigators could also document the latest unrest “for potential future legal proceedings.”
Rights groups said bystanders were killed in the largest crackdown since Shiite Muslim clerics took power in the 1979 revolution. Tehran accuses “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled rivals and foreign enemies the United States and Israel.
The Iranian delegation condemned the “politicized” resolution of the Human Rights Council and rejected external interference, saying in a statement that Iran has its own independent and powerful accountability mechanism to investigate “the root causes of recent events.”
25 countries including France, Mexico and South Korea voted in favor, 7 countries including China and India voted against, and 14 countries abstained.
“This is the worst mass murder in Iran’s contemporary history,” Payam Akhavan, an Iranian-Canadian former United Nations prosecutor, said at the meeting. He called for the “Nuremberg Moment,” referring to the international criminal trials of Nazi leaders after World War II.
Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, told the Security Council that its emergency meeting was ineffective and provided a tally of the estimated 3,000 people killed in Tehran during the unrest.
However, an Iranian official told Reuters that at least 5,000 people had been killed, including 500 members of the security forces.
The US-based human rights group HRANA said it had verified 4,519 riot-related deaths so far and was reviewing a further 9,049 deaths.
China, Pakistan, Cuba and Ethiopia have also questioned the effectiveness of the human rights conference, with Beijing’s ambassador Ja Guide calling the unrest in Iran an “internal matter”.
It is unclear who will bear the cost of the UN extension. The funding crisis has stalled other investigations.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin and Emma Farge; Editing by Gareth Jones)