The United Nations Economic and Social Council has just appointed Iran to the Committee for Programme and Coordination - the body that sets the global direction on human rights, women’s rights, disarmament, and counter-terrorism.
In the same round of votes, China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and Sudan were elected by acclamation to the Committee on NGOs - the very tribunal that decides which civil society organizations are allowed to enter the sacred temple of human rights in Geneva.
Only the United States had the courage to call Iran, Cuba, and Nicaragua “unfit." The rest of the so-called “free world" - Canada, France, Spain, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia, the United Kingdom, Finland, Switzerland, and Austria - approved the appointments.
The theocratic Iran that slaughters dissidents, brutally represses women who dare to show a lock of hair, finances Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Houthis, spreading terror from Lebanon to Yemen, and that has massacred thousands of protesters in recent months, will now sit and decide global policies on women’s rights and the fight against terrorism.
This is the third major appointment for Iran at the UN in just one month. First, the Iranian regime was elected vice-president (Abbas Tajik) of the UN Commission for Social Development, which deals with “the promotion of democracy, gender equality, and the guarantee of tolerance and non-violence." Then Tehran secured the vice-presidency of the commission tasked with implementing the United Nations Charter.
With its total surveillance apparatus and the re-education camps in Xinjiang - where one million Uyghurs are “re-educated" through forced labor, sterilizations, and indoctrination - Beijing will now oversee the NGOs that dare to criticize authoritarian regimes.
The scene is worthy of the Palace of the Absurd: a Tibetan dissident or a Hong Kong human rights lawyer who requests a hearing at the UN only to find themselves facing a Chinese Communist Party official who decides whether their voice deserves to be heard.
Then there’s Cuba. The island that exports misery and repression, where opponents end up in prison for “crimes against the revolution," now sits with veto power over the NGOs that would like to denounce these violations.
This NGO Committee has the power to accredit or de-accredit thousands of civil society groups. With a majority of dictatorships inside it, the risk - already highlighted by UN Watch - is glaring: the few independent voices at the UN that denounce the Uyghur genocide, Iranian repression, and Cuban prisons will be rejected, while the puppet NGOs created by the regimes themselves will be promoted - those that chant the mantra of “human rights with Eastern characteristics."
Hillel Neuer of UN Watch said: “It’s like putting Al Capone in charge of the fight against organized crime." He’s right, but it might actually be even worse.
At least Al Capone never pretended to be the champion of international legality.
They call it “multilateralism," but it is the surrender of Western universalism to the most hypocritical cultural relativism.
The UN no longer defends human rights. It defends the right of dictators not to be disturbed while they trample them.
The latest mention of Iran by the UN Women agency dates back to October 5, 2022: “Standing with Iranian women, free to exercise autonomy over their own bodies". Eureka!
In the past month, the UN Women agency has written about poverty and war in Sudan, Lebanese women victims of Israeli bombs, online misogyny, sport as inclusion, and the empowerment of Christina Koch (the first woman on a lunar mission), Dolores Huerta (trade union leader and feminist), Jane Goodall, Maya Angelou, and Aretha Franklin (the famous “R-E-S-P-E-C-T"). Zero on Iran.
Zero on Bita Hemmati, the first Iranian woman sentenced to death by the regime for the January protests, along with three other demonstrators-protests during which the regime killed at least thirty thousand people. Among the charges against those sentenced to death, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency, there is also “collaboration with the United States," in addition to “moharebeh," a term present in a Quranic verse that means “waging war against God." The regime accused her of throwing objects, participating in protest demonstrations, and being a “threat to national security." In Iran’s theocracy, a woman is not a sovereign body; she is merely territory to be conquered and a symbol to be subjugated.
The statistics are chilling and speak a language that no Western euphemism can soften. In 2025, Iran officially carried out 1,630 death sentences, the highest number ever. The ayatollahs’ regime has thus sent at least four citizens to death by hanging every day. Crimes punishable by capital punishment in Iran range from drug trafficking to “corruption on Earth"- the charge frequently used as accusations against protesters in recent years.
Bita Hemmati will be the first woman explicitly hanged for participating in the January 2026 protests. Hemmati had appeared in a video broadcast by state television in January, while being interrogated by the Revolutionary Guards and “confessing" her crimes.
The regime uses the gallows as a pedagogy of terror: sham trials, confessions extracted under torture, judges issuing verdicts “in the name of Allah." Just like in the case of the wrestling champion Saleh Mohammadi, executed at the age of nineteen.
Where have the great feminist marches gone?
Where are the influencers who shout “my body, my choice" when it comes to white, bourgeois bodies, but fall silent in front of Iranian bodies that are whipped, blinded by pellets, or hanged for claiming the same principle?
Contemporary feminism, at least in its mainstream version, has carefully chosen its enemies: white patriarchy, colonialism, Islamophobia. The Shia theocratic patriarchy, on the other hand, is absolved with the excuse of anti-colonialism or “geopolitical complexity," while Western universities host conferences on “queer Islam" or on the veil as an act of resistance. Cultural relativism, once a sophisticated critique of ethnocentrism as Claude Lévi-Strauss intended it, has thus become an alibi for cowardice.
On the cover of Italian weekly L’Espresso, Bita Hemmati would have looked far better than the “colonialist" Israeli soldier: young, blonde, without a veil, free. But the Iranian regime laughs at our cowardice. And it’s about time we stopped giving them that pleasure.