Saudi-Iran rivalry spills into UN Human Rights Council
TEHRAN, Iran — On March 23, the United Nations Human Rights Council voted to pass Resolution A/HCR/31/L.27, thereby extending the mandate of the special human rights rapporteur for Iran, Ahmed Shaheed. The resolution was approved by a margin of five votes. Shaheed, whose mandate was renewed for the fifth time since his first appointment in 2011, said in a statement that the Iranian government has taken positive steps to address the matters of dispute with the UN Human Rights Council. However, he reiterated previous claims of executions, arbitrary arrests, detentions and prosecutions of Iranian citizens over the exercise of their rights.
While Iran was unhappy with the renewal of Ahmed Shaheed’s mandate as special rapporteur for Iran, it appears to be even more irritated over how Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar voted in favor of the measure at the UN Human Rights Council.
Author Fereshteh Sadeghi Posted April 8, 2016
The Islamic Republic was quick to react to the vote, with its Foreign Ministry on March 24 strongly rejecting it as politically motivated. However, what appears to have particularly irritated Iran is how three of its neighbors on the other side of the Persian Gulf — Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Qatar — voted in favor of the measure. Indeed, the Iranian Foreign Ministry noted that “Saudi Arabia itself does not respect the basic rights of its own citizens, particularly female dissidents and activists.”
This was the first time that Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar had directly voted against Iran on human rights-related matters. In the UN Human Rights Council’s previous vote on Iran, Resolution A/HRC/25/L.9 in March 2014, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, along with Kuwait, were among the countries that abstained.
Of further note, Iran implicitly criticized Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states at the UN Human Rights Council only some three weeks prior to the vote on Shaheed’s mandate. Speaking in Geneva on March 1, the head of the Iranian judiciary’s Human Rights Council, Mohammad Javad Larijani, slammed regimes that “deprive their citizens of the very basic and minimal right to participate in shaping their destiny,” in a thinly veiled reference to some of Iran’s southern neighbors.
Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE’s votes at the UN Human Rights Council prompted some Iranian media outlets to suggest that Iran has been given an opportunity to retaliate by urging the international body to shed light on human rights abuses on the Arabian Peninsula.
The row over the latest Iran-related vote in the UN Human Rights Council could be seen as part of the wider tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia. What already were strong differences spiked in the aftermath of the death of hundreds of Iranian hajj pilgrims in Mina on Sept. 24, 2015. However, what broke the camel’s back were the attacks by angry protesters on Saudi diplomatic missions in Iran this January over Riyadh’s execution of Saudi Shiite dissident cleric Nimr al-Nimr. In response, Saudi Arabia cut diplomatic ties with Iran, with other GCC states following suit and either also cutting or downgrading relations.
Indeed, former Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told Al-Monitor he sees Saudi Arabia’s vote at the UN Human Rights Council in the context of its rivalry with Iran, including what he called the regional war “the [Saudi] kingdom has waged on the Islamic Republic.” Asefi told Al-Monitor, “Saudi Arabia has been interfering in the internal affairs of other countries and has been adopting a hostile and belligerent policy toward Iran for several years now. Based on our information, the Saudis helped the Israelis a lot in their war on Lebanon’s resistance movement Hezbollah in July 2006 and went on with the same attitude in Syria and later in Yemen. The war on Yemen has destroyed the country’s infrastructure; 80% of Yemenis are displaced and in need of assistance. Now, the kingdom faces the fact that it has failed in Yemen, but instead of accepting its own incapability to understand the real facts on the ground and reviewing its wrong policies, it is shifting the blame to Iran and taking the confrontation to other fronts such as the UN Human Rights Council.”
Yet when challenged about the human rights situation in Iran, the former senior Iranian diplomat simply asserted that “Saudi Arabia is not at a position to give an opinion about human rights in Iran,” adding, “when it comes to the human rights record in Saudi Arabia — a country that does not even hold elections — the facts speak for themselves.”
Riyadh has indeed been under fierce criticism over its rights record for years. Human Rights Watch and Human Rights First have issued reports and statements on rights violations within Saudi Arabia, while the yearlong Saudi-led war in Yemen has drawn condemnation not only from rights bodies but also charity groups such as Oxfam. Moreover, in a recent statement to the UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International noted the “unwavering record of committing gross and systematic human rights violations by the kingdom.” Amnesty also accuses Saudi Arabia of standing in the way of the establishment of an independent international investigation into violations by all parties to the conflict in Yemen.
Qatar and the UAE, the two other GCC members who voted to renew Shaheed’s mandate on Iran, have also been under fire over their rights records. Amnesty has condemned Doha on several occasions, saying it has “arbitrarily restricted the rights to freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly.” Meanwhile, Human Rights Watch in its 2015 report slammed the UAE for arbitrarily detaining individuals on alleged national security grounds. It also accused UAE security forces of torturing detainees in pretrial detention.
However, UN Human Rights Council Resolution A/HCR/31/L.27 is about the human rights situation in Iran, and not the Arabian Peninsula. Thus, regardless of the dismal rights records of some of those who voted in favor of the resolution, the key matter is the human rights situation in Iran, and perhaps equally pressingly, how the intensified Iranian-Saudi tension is increasingly affecting their immediate neighborhood.
In this vein, Asefi, who has also previously served as Iran’s ambassador to the UAE, said he does not believe that Qatar and the UAE have adopted inherently confrontational postures toward Iran. He told Al-Monitor that Doha and Abu Dhabi are “used to following Riyadh,” and expressed hope that the two countries will change their course. Moreover, Asefi concluded, “Although Iran has all the means and capabilities to react in kind [to the Saudi vote], it has more important priorities in the Middle East. Hence, Tehran prefers to help settle down the current regional conflicts and crises, rather than play Saudi Arabia at its own childish game.”
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http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2016/04/iran-saudi-qatar-uae-shaheed-un-human-rights-council.html#ixzz45Qk1xTp0
