The organs of the United Nations are tools used when and against whomever imperialism desires. Join us on Telegram , Twitter , and VK . Contact us: info@strategic-culture.su In March of this year, amid the criminal war of aggression waged by the United States and Israel against Iran, the report on the human rights situation in the Persian nation, presented by Mai Sato, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the matter, became public. The document, laden with an unusually emotional tone and a clear sympathy for the violent protests that sought to overthrow the Iranian government, struggles to conceal its propagandistic and profoundly unbalanced character.
“There are many respects in which the Special Rapporteur is unable to reconcile the State narrative with the evidence she received,” states the document, which quickly reverberated throughout the imperialist media monopoly. This statement is revealing: for Sato, the claims of the Iranian government amount to nothing more than a “narrative,” a manipulated and unreliable version of events. Meanwhile, allegations made by NGOs based in North America and Europe and financed by Western governments are treated by the rapporteur as “evidence,” without even having been investigated.
Sato believes that the Iranian government’s reports regarding the destruction caused by violent demonstrators (there is extensive graphic material documenting these violent actions) are not legitimate, yet she even considers the death toll presented by organizations funded by the United States and attributed to state repression to be “conservative.”
Her sources, as is customary in reports concerning governments targeted by Washington’s wrath, include Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Freedom House, and other apparatuses founded and financed by imperialist states and international billionaires. In addition, organizations specializing in Iran and headquartered in the United States, Canada, and Europe are cited, such as the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, funded by European governments and private foundations and whose board includes Francis Fukuyama; Holistic Resilience, sponsored by the State Department; and the Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, which openly admits to “accepting money from governments, non-governmental organizations, and private individuals.”
But it is hardly surprising that the rapporteur should be so partial in her report. This position—that of Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran—was created precisely to serve as yet another front in the imperialist war against Tehran. The position was established by the notorious UN Commission on Human Rights in 1984, only a few years after the triumph of the revolution and amid Iraq’s proxy war against Iran.
Even then, the double standard typical of imperial humanitarian frauds was already evident. The Shah’s dictatorship, born out of a coup d’état sponsored by the CIA and MI6 to seize Iranian oil, and one of the most brutal regimes in the Middle East thanks to the complete support provided by the CIA and Mossad to SAVAK and its torture centers, did not merit any concern whatsoever from the saintly humanitarian agents of the United Nations for 25 years. Only after this brutal dictatorship had been overthrown by the Iranian masses did the regime born of those same masses’ will become a matter of concern for the imperialist body—precisely because it was no longer a pawn of the United States but rather a threat to its global domination.
Yet there was another aspect of the UN’s double standard when it created the rapporteurship for Iran. In 1984, Iran was not at war against a phantom. It was fighting the powerful Iraqi army, armed by the United States and all its allies and therefore feeling free to do whatever it wished against the new anti-Western demon, committing grave war crimes on Iranian soil and severe abuses against internal opponents or alleged opponents—expulsion, torture, execution, and extermination of Iranians, Shiites, Kurds, and Iraqi communists. Nevertheless, the Commission on Human Rights created no rapporteur mandate for Iraq—it only did so in 1991, when Saddam Hussein shifted from hero to villain after losing the confidence of imperialism for having failed to defeat the Iranian Revolution and for threatening Western control over oil marketed by the Gulf monarchies.
The Commission on Human Rights, though officially depoliticized, followed to the letter the dictates of the Security Council, whose Resolution 479 of September 1980 did not even demand the withdrawal of Iraqi troops that had just invaded and occupied 650 kilometers of Iranian territory with thousands of tanks, armored vehicles, and artillery on the very first day of the war. “If Iran had not been a pariah state after occupying the United States embassy, it might have secured a favorable motion and vote,” journalist Robert Fisk recalls in his book The Great War for Civilisation.
It is clear: the organs of the United Nations are tools used when and against whomever imperialism desires. It is no coincidence that the total pressure exerted on Iran was reduced precisely at the moment when Iranian leaders decided to risk an rapprochement with the United States following Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan—and then, as if by magic, the Commission on Human Rights decided to suspend the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on Iran. However, when the attempt at rapprochement failed, the Commission once again served as an instrument of the United States and resumed its full offensive against the country. Human rights, as can be seen, are nothing more than an argument of convenience.
Now let us examine who the Special Rapporteurs on human rights in Iran have been, appointed by the Commission on Human Rights and, from the 2000s onward, by its successor, the Human Rights Council: Andrés Aguilar Mawdsley (1984–1986) , a senior Venezuelan state bureaucrat during the governments of the Punto Fijo Pact (a façade democracy), having served as Minister of Justice and ambassador to the United States; Reynaldo Galindo Pohl (1986–1995) , who represented the successive military dictatorships of El Salvador (repressive, corrupt, and a puppet of the United States) in various international mechanisms, including the OAS—known as the “Ministry of Colonies” of the United States; Maurice Copithorne (1995–2002) , a Canadian foreign service official for three decades; Ahmed Shaheed (2011–2016) , former minister and senior bureaucrat of the Maldives, entirely aligned with the liberal policy of imperialism to the point of founding a so-called “Open Society Association,” which, according to Wikipedia, is “dedicated to the promotion of human rights, tolerance, and democracy,” and of being regarded by Amnesty International—an organization sponsored by Western bankers and governments—as a “leader in human rights advocacy” in the Maldives. He has also been an honored guest at events organized by the British government’s Foreign Office and received the Global Leadership Awards from Vital Voices, an entity created by none other than Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright; Asma Jahangir (2016–201 , a former Pakistani activist who, unlike the other rapporteurs, never held government office. She served as vice president of the International Federation for Human Rights, an organization funded by European governments and George Soros. Yet even if she may have been well-intentioned, prominence and leadership within organizations financed by bankers and imperialist governments—the greatest violators of human rights in history—do not legitimize anyone as a defender of human rights; on the contrary, they discredit them; Javaid Rehman (2018–2024) , a British-Pakistani academic who, as revealed in his profile on Brunel University London’s website, “received significant research grants and funding” from the European Commission, for which he also served as an adviser. He certainly would not have received such support had he contradicted European policy toward Iran, a central target of destabilization for European imperialism. He also acts as an adviser to British parliamentarians; Mai Sato (2024– ) , an academic and director of the Institute for Crime and Justice Policy Research (ICPR) at Birkbeck, University of London. The ICPR receives public funding from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council. She is also co-founder of the Japanese NGO CrimeInfo, which originated from a project financed by the European Commission in 2017 . Her case is similar to Rehman’s: if Sato were to contradict British and European policy toward Iran, would the institutions she oversees continue receiving such funding in light of the highly negative repercussions on her work? Justifying Criminal Sanctions Against Iran Mai Sato devotes three paragraphs of her 17-page report to international sanctions against Iran. However, she assigns no real importance to the impact of sanctions on the lives of the population and on the violation of their human rights.
From the very first days of the 1979 Revolution, the United States froze billions of dollars belonging to the Iranian government, banned trade and investment by its companies in the country, sanctioned foreign companies investing in Iran and Iranian companies trading abroad, and cut the country off from the international financial system. Europe and the West, subservient to the United States, followed the same sanctions path, as did the United Nations, which has imposed economic sanctions on the country since 2006.
Decades of suffocation have meant that, for example, between 2012 and 2024, Iran’s GDP per capita fell by around 37%, according to World Bank data. When, during his first term, Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear agreement with Iran and Europeans followed suit by reimposing certain sanctions, Iranian oil exports declined by as much as 80%, followed by a relative recovery, though still far below the average levels of the early 2010s. In 2025, the UN Security Council also reinstated sanctions suspended under the 2015 agreement—and Sato, in her report, justifies them, accusing Iran of failing to fulfill its commitments, echoing Trump’s discourse.
The sanctions also drastically devalued the Iranian currency, which, combined with restrictions on exports, made imports of goods and services far more expensive, accelerating inflation and driving away investors. According to estimates, over the last 15 years sanctions have significantly reduced Iran’s middle class, pushing millions of people into a more vulnerable social situation, while the prices of medicines increased by as much as 300%.
“The rapporteur acknowledges that sanctions have exacerbated Iran’s economic difficulties, but the available evidence indicates that current economic hardships reflect multiple interconnected factors, including decades of domestic decisions in social, economic, and environmental policies,” the document states.
She qualifies the statement: “not all of Iran’s humanitarian and human rights challenges can be attributed to sanctions.” Yet the same reasoning does not apply to “repression”: responsibility for human rights violations lies with the Iranian state, period. The greatest power in human history imposes an almost complete economic blockade on the country for nearly 50 years, yet the state is blamed for everything—remember, the state born of the 1979 Revolution, for not a peep was ever heard about the bloody repression of Reza Pahlavi’s puppet dictatorship.
“Systematic repression of dissent, restrictions on civil and political freedoms, discrimination against minorities, women and girls, economic mismanagement and corruption, and decades of environmental degradation,” Sato concludes, “reflect domestic policy choices for which the Iranian authorities are responsible.” This appears to be a clear and cheap attack—outside the rapporteur’s mandate—on the political and economic model chosen by the Iranian people in 1979. Perhaps it is one of the clearest signs of interference and an arbitrary attempt to force regime change through the United Nations.
In the end, Sato’s report serves to justify the decades-long attack against the Iranian population promoted by the United States and its allies, including through the United Nations. It covers up the real assaults on Iranians’ human rights and encourages their continuation by attempting to frame the Iranian government and pressure it to follow the dictates of the very same powers that sustained the Shah’s dictatorship and that now attack the country even militarily.
Or, as Maurice Copithorne himself, rapporteur between 1995 and 2002, acknowledged: this work is a “psychological warfare” effort aimed at breaking the resilience of the Iranian people.