World powers will vote on whether to oust Iran from the United Nations body tasks with empowering women.
The vote is a big moment in global solidarity against Iran’s bloody crackdown on a women-led protest movement. The draft resolution will give an indication of global unity against Iran’s suppression of protests.
Activists and experts say Iran’s role in the 45-member commission on the status of women is a farce. They point to the fact Iran’s forces have beaten and killed women who were peacefully calling for gender equality.
The UN economic and social council (Ecosoc), which oversees the commission, will gather in New York today to consider a drafted resolution to remove Iran “with immediate effect”. It comes after Iran started a four-year term on the commission.
The resolution was drafted by the U.S.
The vote is expected to pass. Many of the 54 members of the council support the measure. However, Iran and its allies have been pressuring members to abstain from voting.
The final number of abstentions will be the indicator of diplomatic disunity over the issue.
Iran and several allies wrote to the council to argue a vote would “undoubtedly create an unwelcome precedent,” calling for members not to back the draft vote in order to avoid a “new trend for expelling sovereign and rightfully elected states from any given body of the international system”.
A separate U.N. Body, the Human Rights Council, voted last month overwhelmingly to set up a fact-finding investigation into human rights abuses in Iran. That could make prosecutions in international courts more probable.
The UN says more than 300 people have been killed in the ongoing protest crackdown, including at least 40 children. Medics and people on the ground have said that women are being singled out at protests, with security forces firing shotguns at their faces, breasts, and genitals.
The Tehran regime has imprisoned hundreds and begun what is expected to be a campaign of public executions. Authorities on Monday hanged a man from a crane for allegedly killing two members of a pro-regime militia, the second execution in less than a week of people involved in protests against Iran’s ruling theocracy.
Protests and unrest across Iran exploded almost three months ago after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who was arrested by morality police that enforces Iran’s mandatory dress code laws.
Amini was allegedly beaten into a coma and died in the hospital.
The demonstrations have turned into a popular revolt that poses one of the biggest challenges to the Shia clerical elite since they took power in a 1979 revolution.
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