Iran: UN report on 2022 riots built on ‘baseless claims’
Iran’s Foreign Ministry strongly condemned a UN report on the 2022 riots in the country, saying that the report was built on “baseless claims” and “false and biased information, without a legal basis”.
The report by a fact-finding mission mandated by the United Nations on Friday alleged that Iran’s response to the riots that broke out following the death of the 22-year-old Iranian girl, Mahsa Amini, in September 2022 amounts to serious human rights violations.
The ministry’s spokesman Nasser Kanani in a statement on Saturday said that human rights mechanisms of the world body have turned into “a plaything” in the hands of some regimes to advance their sinister and unlawful goals.
Kanaani said the report repeats groundless allegations rooted in inaccurate and biased information and, therefore, lacks legal credibility and is fundamentally rejected.
He denounced attempts to foment Iranophobia and defame Iran, stating that the so-called fact-finding mission was established and funded in November 2022 as a result of the “ridiculous show of human rights” by a number of Western governments, especially Germany.
The Iranian diplomat said the mission’s latest report entails an organized set of falsifications and lies that have purposefully altered realities.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran considers the report, which has been compiled and engineered by the Zionist regime, the United States, and some Western countries, as a clear example of abuse of the sublime human rights concepts and values for the purpose of pursuing short-sighted political goals. It believes that the report has no legal acceptability and effect whatsoever,” he said.
Kanaani underscored that the report revealed that the so-called fact-finding mission functions in compliance with the schemes of its German, British, American and Israeli founders, and abuses the UN human rights mechanisms to serve the sinister and illegal objectives of those regimes.
Kanaani also advised the initiators of the mission to deal with human rights violations in their own countries rather than improperly meddle in Iran’s affairs, arguing they should attend to the violation of rights of thousands of Palestinian women and children in Gaza, where more than 30,000 civilians have been killed in Israeli strikes over the past five months.
“The countries that violate the rights of other nations and are complicit in all of the Zionist regime’s crimes and massacre of civilians, particularly women and children, cannot present themselves as advocates, or judge the human rights status in other countries. They must be held accountable for their crimes concerning gross violations of human rights,” Kanaani said.
Kanaani further pointed to the formation of a special committee on Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi’s order to probe the 2022 unrest, adding that its final report was recently submitted to the president.