Iran International
The United Nations’ fact-finding mission, set up in December 2022 following Iran's bloody crackdown on protesters, will release its comprehensive report on March 18.
The mission is also scheduled to release its preliminary report on the International Day of Women (March 8).
In his address to the 55th session of the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on Monday, Iran's Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian accused the UN of double standards and criticized it for setting up the fact-finding mission for Iran but not taking any serious action on Israel’s killing of civilians in Gaza.
“We will not forget the outcries in this place months ago under the pretext of an Iranian girl’s death and the formation of a so-called fact-finding mission,” he said.
In her address to the same meeting Monday, the German Foreign Minister Anna Baerbock called for extending the mission’s mandate. “I want to be crystal-clear to those who claim that calling out violations is an interference in internal affairs: Human rights are universal. A life is a life,” she said.
Mahmoud Amiri-Moghadam, director of Oslo-based Iran Human Rights Organization, told Iran International on Monday that it is the outcome of the mission’s investigations that is of great significance and expressed hope that its mandate would be extended for another year.
“The Islamic Republic has always accused human rights organizations and the UN rights bodies of being politically motivated and has never been accountable to them, he said. “But the mission’s report will be a very important message to [Iranian] people who will know the world has heard them …, especially if the mission concludes that [the regime’s actions] were crimes against humanity,” he added.
The UN Human Rights Council voted November 24, 2022, to launch an independent investigation into Iran's deadly repression of peaceful anti-government protests during the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. The motion to form the mission passed with 25 votes in favor, six opposed and 16 countries abstaining from the vote. The following month, members of the mission were announced.
The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in September 2022 in the custody of the morality police unleashed a wave of protests across Iran that lasted until February 2023.
During the protests, security forces killed more than 550 civilians including tens of children. Security forces also blinded scores of protesters with shotgun pellet aimed directly at their faces, and tortured many of the tens of thousands of protesters that were arrested. Many of the victims also claim to have been sexually assaulted during interrogations and in prison.
In the past year Iran has also hanged nine protesters despite widespread pleas at home and abroad not to carry out the death sentences after sham trials held behind closed doors and without due process.
Despite these documented atrocities, Tehran almost immediately announced that it did not recognize the fact-finding mission and would not cooperate with it and summoned the German envoy Hans-Udo Muzel to the foreign ministry to protest Berlin’s key role in urging a special Human Rights Council meeting and the formation of the mission.
The UN Special Rapporteur on Iran Javaid Rehman said in November 2023 that the mandate of the mission goes beyond Iran’s human rights violations during 2022 protest crackdown and even extends into the mass execution of political prisoners in 1980s as well as violations of minority rights.
Members of the mission have not been allowed to visit Iran to collect evidence and speak to victims of the violence or their families. The Islamic Republic has also refused to allow UN special rapporteurs on human rights to visit the country since 1992.
Two confidential reports by the UN nuclear watchdog, sent to member states on Monday, paint an overall bleak picture of Iran’s nuclear program with persisting obstacles to proper inspection casting a shadow over its nature and raising concerns about the intentions of the regime in Tehran.
“Only through constructive and meaningful engagement can these concerns be addressed,” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) chief Rafael Grossi wrote in one of his two quarterly reports. “Public statements made in Iran regarding its technical capabilities to produce nuclear weapons only increase the Director General’s concerns about the correctness and completeness of Iran’s safeguards declarations.”
According to the reports, seen by several news outlets, Iran now has more than 5.5 tons of enriched uranium, up by a ton from October. This includes 712.2 kilograms of uranium enriched at up to 20 percent and 121.5 kilograms at up to 60 percent. It’s this latter stock that has decreased by about 7 kilograms in the past hundred days.
Iran needs a minimum of 42 kilograms of uranium enriched to 60 percent to make a nuclear bomb, based on definitions set by the IAEA. It had enough of this material at the end of 2023 to produce three nuclear bombs. The dilution last quarter means that stock is still more than enough for two.
It’s unclear why Iran decided to get rid of some of its highly-enriched uranium in the last three months. And IAEA has offered no explanation in its reports. It is hard to ignore the fact, however, that the timeframe of this ‘downblending’ matches the timeframe of the recent crisis in the Middle East, which began with Hamas’ rampage of border areas of southern Israel and the ensuing –and ongoing– Israeli onslaught on Gaza last October.
"Maybe they don't want to increase tensions (with the West). Maybe they have an agreement with somebody. We don't know," Reuters quoted a senior diplomat. "At the beginning of the year they decided to do a downblending... A couple of weeks later they did another downblending, this time with a smaller amount."
Whatever the reason behind the decision, the reduction in Iran’s near weapons-grade uranium would likely offer some relief to American and European leaders who have been struggling to find a convincing response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
President Joe Biden spent the first half of his term trying to revive the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran –and failed. He then turned to chasing an informal agreement, looking the other way as China purchased tens of billions of Iran’s sanctioned oil, and releasing at least $16 billion of frozen funds, all to encourage the Iranian regime to limit its enrichment program, even temporarily.
As a result of those secret talks, Iran slowed its enrichment of uranium to up to 60 percent last summer. In November, however, it resumed its pre-slowdown activities, according to an IAEA report last December.
Iranian officials have always maintained that Iran’s nuclear program is purely for peaceful purposes. But nuclear experts are almost unanimous in their assessment that enrichment to the levels and in the amounts that Iran has been doing since 2021 cannot be justified in the absence of a weapons program.
Successive US administrations, including the current one, have publicly vowed to prevent Iran from ever obtaining a nuclear weapon. In private, however, politicians and experts say that it’s near impossible to stop the Iranian regime if it ever decides to make a bomb.