April 13, 2015 | PJ Media
And Now, Iran Wins a Seat on Governing Board of UN Agency for Women
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 — 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 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.
The U.S. made a feeble gesture to do something about this, calling for a vote on this slate, instead of the usual “election” by acclamation. Under rules of the 54-member Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), which elects the governing board of UN Women, this translated into a secret ballot on which voting members had to write in the names of the countries they favored. Iran got the lowest number of votes: 36 (compared to 53 each for Samoa and the UAE, 52 for Turkmenistan and 49 for Pakistan). But it was still a classic UN no-contest election. Iran won a seat. Let’s run those numbers again. Yes, among the 54 members of ECOSOC — which claims broad responsibility for some 70% of the UN’s resources, some 22% of which are bankrolled by U.S. tax dollars — there are 36 members who wrote in “Iran” as one of their picks to guide UN policy toward women.
U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power described herself as “deeply disappointed” by the result. That’s a slight variation on the wording she used last year, when Iran won a slew of seats on various UN bodies, including reelection to the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women. Last year Power said the U.S. was “very disappointed.”
Among those who should be even more deeply disappointed are American citizens, whose money not only pays for a big share of the UN, but who also maintain in high style a massive U.S. Mission to the UN in New York, appended to a huge State Department that operates as part of a lavishly funded gargantuan federal government — which right now appears unable to achieve even the modest goal of keeping Iran’s misogynist regime off the governing board of the UN program set up with great fanfare in 2010 as the UN’s flagship for fostering decent treatment of women.