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The United Nations is the best example of an organization which is dominated by countries who only act on personal interests and who abuse International Law and means to propagate their own totalitarian vision on world matters.

On April 29, the United Nations elected Iran to its Commission on the Status of Women, handing a four-year seat on the influential human rights body to a [totalitarian] theocratic state in which stoning is enshrined in law and lashings are required for women judged “immodest.” Just days after Iran abandoned a high-profile bid for a seat on the U.N. Human Rights Council, it began a covert campaign to claim a seat on the Commission on the Status of Women, which is “dedicated exclusively to gender equality and advancement of women,” according to its website. (fox news, april 29, 2010)

Free Iranian Women. "Jomhuri-E-Eslami Ave" means "Islamic Republic Avenue." Located in Tehran's centre, Jomhuri Avenue is one of the city's commercial centres for electronic equipment. Its also the place where the Tehrans younsters hang out, talk and flirt during the evenings in lack off dancings or cafes.

What’s worse, the United States and 12 other Western democracies kept silent while the dictatorship was nominated, thus enabling it to get the seat… This is the government that allows members of the Basij militia to “forcibly marry female virgin prisoners the night before their scheduled executions, raping their new “wives” and making it religiously acceptable to execute them.” (njconservative)

But U.S. Representative Thaddeus G. McCotter (R-MI), chairman of the Republican House Policy Committee, issued the following statement:

“By electing the Tehran butchers to its Commission on the Status of Women, a morally rancid United Nations has salted the wounds of the Iranian freedom movement’s regime-murdered martyrs, such as Neda Soltan and Taraneh Mousavi.  From today forth, may no friend of Lady Liberty ever be fool enough to trust this global Tammany Hall with their freedom and security.” (Planet Iran, april 29, 2010.)

Iran’s election comes just a week after one of its senior clerics declared that women who wear revealing clothing are to blame for earthquakes, a statement that created an international uproar — but little affected their bid to become an international arbiter of women’s rights.

“Many women who do not dress modestly … lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes,” said the respected cleric, Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi.

Iran has warned suntanned women and girls who looked like “walking mannequins” will be arrested as part of a new drive to enforce the Islamic dress code.

Brig Hossien Sajedinia, Tehran’s police chief, said a national crackdown on opposition sympathisers would be extended to women who have been deemed to be violating the spirit of Islamic laws. He said:

“The public expects us to act firmly and swiftly if we see any social misbehaviour by women, and men, who defy our Islamic values. In some areas of north Tehran we can see many suntanned women and young girls who look like walking mannequins.”

“We are not going to tolerate this situation and will first warn those found in this manner and then arrest and imprison them.”

Iran’s Islamic leadership has in recent weeks launched a scaremongering campaign to persuade the population that vice is sweeping the streets of the capital. National law stipulates that women wear headscarves and shape shrouding cloaks but many women, particularly in the capital, spend heavily on fashions that barely adhere to the regulations. (Planet Iran, april 27, 2010.)

As word of Iran’s intention to join the women’s commission came out, a group of Iranian activists circulated a petition to the U.N. asking that member states oppose its election.

“Iran’s discriminatory laws demonstrate that the Islamic Republic does not believe in gender equality,” reads the letter, signed by 214 activists and endorsed by over a dozen human rights bodies.

The letter draws a dark picture of the status of women in Iran: “women lack the ability to choose their husbands, have no independent right to education after marriage, no right to divorce, no right to child custody, have no protection from violent treatment in public spaces, are restricted by quotas for women’s admission at universities, and are arrested, beaten, and imprisoned for peacefully seeking change of such laws.”

The Commission on the Status of Women is supposed to conduct review of nations that violate women’s rights, issue reports detailing their failings, and monitor their success in improving women’s equality.

Yet critics of Iran’s human rights record say the country has taken “every conceivable step” to deter women’s equality.

“In the past year, it has arrested and jailed mothers of peaceful civil rights protesters,” wrote three prominent democracy and human rights activists in an op-ed published online Tuesday by Foreign Policy Magazine.

“It has charged women who were seeking equality in the social sphere — as wives, daughters and mothers — with threatening national security, subjecting many to hours of harrowing interrogation. Its prison guards have beaten, tortured, sexually assaulted and raped female and male civil rights protesters.”

Iran’s elevation to the commission comes as a black eye just days after the U.S. helped lead a successful effort to keep Iran off the Human Rights Council, which is already dominated by nations that are judged by human rights advocates as chronic violators of essential freedoms. The current membership of the women’s commission is little different.

When its term begins in 2011, Iran will be joined by 10 other countries: Belgium, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Estonia, Georgia, Jamaica, Iran, Liberia, the Netherlands, Spain, Thailand and Zimbabwe. (fox news, april 29, 2010)

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