At a moment when thousands of Iranian women are boldly and publicly throwing off their forced hijab in protest, risking and incurring arrests, beatings and jail, Iran began its four-year term on the UN’s top women’s rights body on March 22, 2022.

Rewarding one of the world’s most misogynistic theocratic regimes with a seat on the UN Commission on the Rights of Women (COSOW)—whose stated goal is “to promote gender equality and empower women worldwide”—is an ugly exposure of the UN’s reactionary role in the world.

Iran was elected to this body in April 2021 by 80 percent of member countries of the UN Economic and Social Council, including several Western imperialist countries. I won’t try to dig deeply in this letter into contending imperialist blocs and their shifting alliances and proxies (in shorthand, U.S./NATO on one side, Russia/China on other), but suffice it to say that Iran has been at pains to promote the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) as leaders in the “anti-imperialist struggle against the Western bloc.”

“Electing the Islamic Republic of Iran to protect women’s rights is like making an arsonist into the town fire chief,” said Hillel Neuer, executive direction of UN Watch.

Even before the promotion of Iran to a seat on COSOW, the UN had appointed Iran to the working group of COSOW that handles complaints, appeals and petitions of women, on March 13, 2019—the very day after the Islamic Republic had sentenced Nasrin Sotoudeh to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes for her work in defending women who refuse the forced hijab/headscarf.

The violations of women’s rights that this COSOW group oversees are the exact violations that the Islamic regime routinely commits against women in Iran, especially against its women political prisoners such as Nasrin Sotoudeh, Narges Mohammadi and so many others.

To cite a few of the 19 possible violations or complaints on the list COSOW handles and are routinely violated by Iran’s regime: 1) arbitrary arrests of women; deaths and torture of women in custody; 2) forced disappearances or abductions of women; 3) discriminatory application of punishments in law based on sex, including corporal and capital punishment; 4) violation of the rights of women human rights defenders to freedom of expression and assembly; 5) stereotypical attitudes towards the role and responsibilities of women; 6) discrimination against women under immigration and nationality laws; 7) violations of the rights of women to own and inherit property.

Many liberal and progressive people and organizations look to the UN to bring justice or at least relief to the people of Iran against its brutal treatment of its population, especially the half that is female. Some people objected to criticizing the UN for its complicity because “they do some good things.”

I think Bob Avakian’s recent interview (April 2022), which should be studied in full, accurately captures the nature of the UN:

The “international community” as represented by the United Nations, is not in reality a community but rather another expression of an imperialist dominated world, a world divided into exploiters and exploited, oppressor and oppressed nations, and contending imperialist rivals. The UN is not a supra-national body but an institution reflecting (and perpetuating) these divisions and conflicts. In today’s world, the legal systems in individual countries, and on a global scale, rest on and reinforce definite exploitative economic and oppressive social relations. The fact is that social justice cannot be achieved within the confines of the existing legal systems that serve capitalism-imperialism and other reactionary systems of rule.