By Emma Farge and Olivia Le Poidevin
GENEVA, Jan 23 (Reuters) – The U.N. rights chief urged Iran on Friday to end its “brutal repression” of protests during an emergency session of the Human Rights Council, where a group of states is calling for U.N. investigators to document alleged abuses for future trials.
Rights groups say thousands of people, including bystanders, were killed during the unrest, which they describe as the biggest crackdown since Shi’ite Muslim clerics took power in the 1979 revolution.
“I call on the Iranian authorities to reconsider, to pull back, and to end their brutal repression,” High Commissioner Volker Turk told the meeting of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, voicing concerns for those detained in mass arrests.
Iranian authorities have blamed the unrest and deaths on “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled opponents and foreign adversaries, the United States and Israel.
At least 50 countries backed the call for Friday’s special session of the Geneva body initiated by states including Iceland, Germany and Britain. Ghana and France were among the many countries to voice concern about Iran’s crackdown.
“This is the worst mass murder in the contemporary history of Iran,” Payam Akhavan, a former U.N. prosecutor of Iranian-Canadian nationality told the meeting.
He called for a “Nuremberg moment”, referring to the international criminal trials of Nazi leaders following World War Two.
IRAN REJECTS EMERGENCY SESSION
But Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, told the Council its emergency session was invalid.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran does not recognise the legitimacy or validity of this special session and its subsequent resolution,” Bahreini said, as he reiterated Iran’s tally that some 3,000 people had been killed in the unrest.
China, Pakistan, Cuba and Ethiopia also questioned the utility of the session, with Beijing’s ambassador Jia Guide calling the unrest in Iran “a matter of internal affairs”.
However, Western diplomats expect the session later on Friday to easily approve a proposal to extend by two years the mandate of a U.N. investigation set up in 2022 after a previous wave of protests.
The proposal also calls for an urgent investigation into crimes linked to the latest unrest that began on December 28 “for potential future legal proceedings”.
However, it was not clear who would cover the costs of the extension amid a U.N. funding crisis that has stalled other probes.
(Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin and Emma FargeEditing by Gareth Jones)
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