United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres speaks at the UN headquarters in New York City, US, before a meeting about the conflict in Gaza, Nov. 6, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Caitlin Ochs

Only a tiny fraction of UN human rights experts has signed on to an official statement condemning the Iranian regime’s deadly crackdown on nationwide anti-government protests, a watchdog has revealed, raising questions about fairness and credibility among UN human rights officials. 

UN Watch, a Geneva-based NGO which monitors the UN, on Wednesday released a report highlighting that most of the UN’s so-called Special Procedures human rights experts — the independent monitors appointed to speak out on urgent abuses — have remained silent or failed to sign an official joint statement calling attention to Iran’s actions. Only five have publicly endorsed the statement, leaving the vast majority of rights mandates absent from the chorus of condemnation. 

The protests, which began on Dec. 28 amid deep economic distress and mounting public frustration with Tehran’s theocratic leadership, quickly spread across the country. Security forces have met demonstrators with lethal force, mass arrests, and a near-total internet blackout that has hampered independent reporting and documentation of abuses. Some reports indicate that up to 20,000 protesters may have been killed by Iranian forces as of earlier this week. Regime officials put the death toll at 2,000-3,000. 

Iran’s government has justified its actions as necessary to quell unrest and labeled opposition to its rule as foreign-inspired, while maintaining a near-total communications blackout that has obscured the full scope of the crackdown. 

The limited signatory list stands in stark contrast to how quickly and forcefully many of these same mandates have responded to abuses in other parts of the world, particularly in cases involving Western allies such as Israel. UN Watch suggested this reflects a troubling double standard within the UN system where violations by authoritarian states like Iran attract neither the urgency nor the scale of response seen in the Israel-Hamas war. In contrast, 28 UN human rights experts signed a letter condemning the peace plan for Gaza backed by US President Donald Trump in October. 

“The killing of peaceful demonstrators must stop, and the labelling of protesters as ‘terrorists’ to justify violence against them is unacceptable,” UN human rights chief Volker Türk said in a statement regarding Iran.

Türk reflected on the 2022 mass protests throughout Iran, stating, “And once again, the authorities’ reaction is to inflict brutal force to repress legitimate demands for change.”

Skeptics pointed out that UN official statements have been more measured and procedural with Iran than the strident calls for accountability that were issued against Israel over the war in Gaza. UN officials, such as Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur on “the Occupied Palestinian Territories,” have accused Israel of committing a so-called “genocide” in Gaza and inflicting famine on its civilians without mentioning Hamas’s strategy of stealing humanitarian aid and embedding its military infrastructure within civilian areas.

Albanese was not one of the UN experts to sign on to the statement condemning the Iranian regime.