Slash More UN Funding: Empowering Iranian Regime and Other Adversaries of Freedom, Peace and Human Rights
by Majid Rafizadeh
February 28, 2026 at 5:00 am
In an unsurprising reversal of its own stated principles, the United Nations elevated the Islamic Republic of Iran, the serial human-rights-abusing regime, by appointing it vice-chair to a body charged with overseeing the UN Charter.
The European Union failed to block the appointment, despite having previously acted to prevent Russia from holding certain international positions after it invaded Ukraine. European governments possess diplomatic leverage and experience in stopping controversial candidates, yet in this instance they chose silence.
The message this appointment sends to the Iranian people and other victims of repressive and exploitative tyrannies, is that the mass murder, torture and blinding of dissidents are secondary to diplomatic etiquette.
The result is that rulers of Iran, which has long been the leading state sponsor of terrorism, are now in a position connected to overseeing the principles meant to restrain state violence and uphold international law. The UN's abuses of moral decency and taxpayer-funds have to be stopped – or at least financially curtailed into the irrelevance the UN so painstakingly earned.
Authoritarian governments often value symbolic recognition as much as material power: it signals to their populations that resistance is futile and that the world accepts their rule.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/22313/un-empowering-iran-regime
