It’s not only at the nuclear talks that Iran is goose-stepping right over those polite U.S. diplomats to grab all it can get. At the United Nations, Iran has just won a seat on the governing board of — what else? — UN Women.
Yes, you read that right. On Friday, at the UN, Iran won a three-year term, starting Jan. 1, 2016, on the board of UN Women [1] — the UN’s self-described agency “for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women.” Never mind that the UN’s own special rapporteur on human rights in Iran, Ahmed Shaheed, reported last month [2] that under President Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s oppression of women is worse than ever.
How did this happen? In procedural terms, it was the latest product of the toxic UN system in which seats on governing boards are allocated to geographic blocs. Each bloc gets a quota of seats to fill, and puts forward a slate of candidates. Iran belongs to the Asia-Pacific States, which in this case avoided such awkward democratic customs as competition by putting forward five candidates for five seats: Samoa, United Arab Emirates, Turkmenistan, Pakistan and Iran.