From Anna Bayefsky's Sanctioning Human Wrongs (National Review, September 7, 2007):
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour, traveled to Iran this week to take a front row seat and listen attentively to Holocaust-denier Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The occasion was billed as a human-rights meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), currently chaired by Cuba.
While Arbour was hobnobbing with anti-Semites, butchers, and anti-democratic forces from around the world, Iranians were being prepared for public hangings. Arbour was reported by the Islamic Republic News Agency as having “expressed pleasure with being at the NAM meeting and described Iran’s representation office in the U.N. in Geneva as ‘very good.’”
...The day after Arbour left Iran the government felt sufficiently buoyed by their U.N. stamp of approval, that they executed 21 prisoners. People are executed in Iran for charges like “enmity against God” or “being corrupt on earth.”
...Arbour’s visit occurred at a time when suppression in Iran is brutal and the numbers of opponents of the regime hanged both in public and in prisons is increasing. It also took place in spite of Iran’s refusal to cooperate with many of the U.N.’s own human-rights investigators, who have sought entry into the country for many years. Arbour’s visit was kept a little-known secret. According to the National Council of Resistance of Iran, as soon as she arrived in Tehran members of families of political prisoners and those on death row, tried to contact her, some rushing to Tehran for the mere chance to see the U.N. chief on human rights, and to deliver their personal appeals. But after spending an hour outside the U.N. building in the hopes of meeting her, they were attacked by the State Security Forces (SSF).
Comments