In a conversation with the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Julia Koch, UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer discusses alleged bias within the U.N. Human Rights Council and its response to the war in Iran.
Mary Julia Koch: I’d love to ask you about the role of the United Nations in the unfolding conflict in Iran. I saw that the independent International Fact Finding Mission on the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was created by the U.N. Human Rights Council in 2022 to investigate human rights violations related to the Women Life Freedom protests, last week that very agency condemned the U.S. and Israeli airstrikes against Iran and called for the consistent application of international law and and for all parties to end attacks. What is your response to the agency’s statement?
Hillel Neuer: Well, I think it’s astonishing that the one U.N. entity that was created to investigate initially the repression of protesters in 2022, but then they received a renewed mandate in January after the massacre — reportedly tens of thousands of protesters — this one U.N. entity that is supposed to speak out for the protesters against the repression and massacre that they suffered, they have now intervened to condemn the one global effort to save the protesters from being massacred.
People, Iranians, human rights activists that we’re in touch with around the world were begging the international community to save them. And this one U.N. entity, which has no mandate other than to speak out for the protesters, has decided to condemn the U.S. and Israel — very one-sided statement, something they have no mandate for and sort of the very opposite of what they were created to do.
If they were to open up the file of what’s happening between countries, you got to start with the fact that for 47 years this regime has called for death to America, death to Israel. And they’ve been taking ongoing measures to do that. They’ve been spending over a trillion dollars to build an illicit nuclear program, thousands of missiles to attack American personnel around the world, try to assassinate my friend Masih Alinejad, the great Iranian journalist and women’s rights activist in Brooklyn. They tried to assassinate President Trump.
If you want to open up the war that’s been ongoing between Iran and the U.S. and Israel, Iran has been arming terror proxies — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis — that have fired thousands and thousands of rockets against Israelis that committed the massacre of October 7th. This is the war. If you want to open that —which they don’t have a mandate to do — then let’s look at both sides of the ledger. They’re not doing that.
And I’m speaking to you from Geneva, right across from the U.N. Human Rights Council. We implored them for weeks to intercede and call a special session. And it took them, I think it was about three weeks, to do something, so they were silent. And suddenly when the U.S. and Israel interceded, within hours you had multiple U.N. agencies and officials who were silent for days, if not weeks, suddenly interceding, suddenly interfering and condemning only one side: America and Israel.
There are well over a dozen agencies and officials who seem to have been mobilized by Guterres’ office to speak out in the same fashion. Secreatry-General Guterres himself, U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk, UNESCO, which deals with science and culture, UNICEF, which deals with children — which were pretty silent, not completely silent, but pretty silent during the massacre, various U.N. rapporteurs who didn’t say anything — all of them suddenly issuing, I would say, uniform statements condemning the U.S. and Israel.
This is a propaganda blitz by the U.N. on behalf of the Islamic regime in Iran. It’s astonishing and obscene.
Mary Julia Koch: It’s also notable which countries have come out and most vehemently opposed the U.S. and Israeli strikes.
Hillel Neuer: I would say new astronomical levels, staggering levels of hypocrisy from some of the world’s worst regimes. There’s a report from the U.N. itself that documented 1600 schools damaged or bombed by Russia. This is Russia, which invaded Ukraine, which is bombing civilians every day, talking about protection of civilians. So it’s really hypocrisy on the next level.
China, certainly in their own country, which has one of the worst human rights record in the world, affecting 1.4 billion people, a fifth of humanity. They’ve trampled thousands of temples of Tibetans. They arrest human rights lawyers. They’ve extinguished democracy in Hong Kong. They put anyone who dares to speak out behind bars. They are saber rattling in Taiwan, threatening Taiwan and other neighbors.
So you know, these countries are bringing cynicism at the United Nations to new levels, sadly. The Human Rights Council, which was founded in 1946 — it was then called the Commission on Human Rights — was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the great humanitarians of the age. And it was founded in wake of World War II to reaffirm faith in human dignity in response to the Holocaust.
So this was a body that had the greatest, most noble beginnings, then got hijacked over time. In the past several decades it’s been a litany of horrible regimes. The current composition is well over 50% are non-democracies. Current members include China, Cuba (a police state), Qatar (which has slave labor), Pakistan (a horrible country when it comes to freedom of religion, women’s rights, freedom of speech), Vietnam is another one.
They’re the ones who appoint these special rapporteurs. And that’s why you have a body that not only the members but even the so-called experts are very anti-Western, anti-Israel, and I would say anti-human rights.
