16 November 2019 :

UN 66th Condemnation Against Human Rights Violations in Iran. On November 14, the Third Committee of the United Nation General Assembly (UNGA), which deals with social and humanitarian issues, adopted a resolution condemning the Iranian regime’s human rights abuses for the 66th time. Introduced by Canada, the resolution was passed with 84 positive votes and in spite of the regime’s widespread efforts to prevent its adoption. The resolution expresses serious concern at “the alarmingly high frequency of the imposition and carrying-out of the death penalty by the Islamic Republic of Iran, in violation of its international obligations, including executions undertaken against persons on the basis of forced confessions or for crimes that do not qualify as the most serious crimes.” The Iranian regime has the highest rate of executions per capita across the world. The resolution warns about “the widespread and systematic use of arbitrary arrests and detention, the case of suspicious deaths in custody, the poor conditions of prisons, the practice of deliberately denying prisoners access to adequate medical treatment, which creates a consequent risk of death.” The UN resolution continues that the “suppression of “the right to freedom of expression and opinion, including in digital contexts, and the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly” and “discrimination and other human rights violations against women, “Including the right to freedom of association and peaceful assembly and the right to freedom of expression and opinion, harassment, intimidation and persecution of political opponents, human rights defenders, women’s and minority rights defenders, labor and trade union activists, students’ rights defenders, environmentalists, academics, film-makers, journalists, bloggers, social media users and social media page administrators, media workers, religious leaders, artists, lawyers, including human rights lawyers, and their families and persons belonging to recognized and unrecognized religious minorities and their families,” and “discrimination and other human rights violations against persons belonging to ethnic, linguistic or other minorities, including but not limited to Arabs, Azeris, Balochis, Kurds and Turkmen, and their defenders.” The 66th UN resolution also reflects the member states’ concerns at the alarmingly high frequency of the imposition and carrying-out of the death penalty, in violation of its international obligations, including: Execution of persons based on forced confessions; the imposition of the death penalty for crimes that do not qualify as severe crimes, including crimes that are overly broad or vaguely defined, in violation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; continuous the imposition death penalty against minors in violation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the President-elect of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), welcomed the adoption of this UN resolution. “Those responsible for the majority of the crimes to which the resolution has referred are the very people who have been continuously perpetrating a crime against humanity for the past four decades, in particular, the 1988 massacre of political prisoners,” Mrs. Rajavi said. Mrs. Rajavi noted that although this resolution has failed to address many aspects of the flagrant violations of human rights in Iran, it nevertheless makes it palpably clear that the theocracy ruling Iran is the most barbaric and egregious abuser of human rights in the world today.