By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer
 
The United Nations General Assembly has once again issued a political resolution on alleged human rights violations in Iran, and it’s not surprising.
The man behind the new resolution is again Ahmed Shaheed, a former Maldivian foreign minister. In early October he published his report, alleging that Tehran refuses to respect minorities’ rights and its judiciary is not fair.
The new report has been emphatically rejected by Iran and other independent nations, which happen to be at odds with the double-standard policies of the United Nations and its self-appointed Security Council members.
Iranian Deputy Ambassador to the UN Gholam-Hussein Dehqani has dismissed the resolution as "political, prejudicial and unbalanced”. Dehqani protests that the resolution does not acknowledge the "positive developments” in Iran.
The resolution builds on a report by Ahmed Shaheed. On June 17, 2011, the UN Human Rights Council, under pressure from the U.S. and its allies, named Shaheed as its human rights investigator on Iran. That’s why Iran has repeatedly criticized his biased reports ever since, saying his appointment is "a selective, politically-tainted and unacceptable move”.
This while Ahmed Shaheed is also in charge of reporting on human rights situations in places like the United States and Canada. But he has never done that! Ahmed Shaheed and the world public opinion are very well aware that both the U.S. and Canada have done more than enough to violate the basic rights of their Black, Latino and indigenous populations. All they need to do is follow the latest anti-racism news and protests across the American cities and towns, or demonstrations by the indigenous population in Canada.
Sadly enough, Ahmed Shaheed and the UN Human Rights Council have never bothered to prove their impartiality – let alone write down and publish even a one-page report about these violations and "substantiated atrocities”.
They won’t talk about the ongoing atrocities in places like Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Yemen either, where the U.S.-NATO militaries habitually portray carnage as "justified” and the death of civilians invariably as "accidental”. Civilian deaths are still the central fact, the very essence in America’s global "war on terror”, where not seeing civilian deaths has equally become a daily habit for the UN Human Rights Council and its rapporteurs.
Another obvious example for the Western breaches of human rights could be their "unwavering support” for Israel and its massacre of Palestinians in occupied territories. Where was Ahmed Shaheed and the UN Human Rights Council when Israel last summer used American bombs and missiles to kill and wound over 10,000 defenseless Palestinians in the defenseless city of Gaza? Just imagine for a second if this was Iran and what type of measures and resolutions they were going to take against the country in a matter of hours if not days!
At the end of the day, these gross atrocities and violations are still there and someone (Ahmed Shaheed) somewhere (UN) has to do something about it before they are repeated all over again – as usual - by the same perpetrators (Israel, U.S. and Canada).
Until then, it is up to the conscientious people of the world to judge for themselves who violates and who continues to violate international human rights law "in practice” and in "substantiated” terms.