Iran Appointed to the UN's Women's Rights Council

This isn't a joke. This really happened. Iran has just been appointed to a 4-year term on the UN's Commission on the Status of Women, The UN's Women's Rights council. The UN's Commission on the Status of Women is the "global champion for gender equality," according to the organization. It works to develop and uphold standards in which all women can exercise their human rights. The commission focuses on issues it deems fundamental to women's equality and attempts to promote the progress of women worldwide.

The obvious problem being is that Women's rights are severely restricted in Iran to say the least, which has one of the worst records when it comes to women's right. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported, saying that women face "serious discrimination" on a variety of issues including marriage, divorce and child custody. Women in Iran are forced to wear the hijab, the headscarf worn by some Muslim women, in public. This even applies to young schoolgirls, who are required to wear the head covering to attend elementary school.

Moreover, married women can’t even leave the country without their husband’s permission. In fact, in September the captain of Iran’s female football (soccer) team, Niloufar Ardalan, couldn’t play in an international tournament in Malaysia because her husband forbade her from traveling. Women have been jailed for speaking out in favor of women's rights. The World Economic Forum's 2017 Global Gender Gap Report ranked Iran 140 out of 144 countries for gender parity.

Even the UN's own report regarding women's rights in Iran states that in Iran "Women and girls treated as second class citizens with thousands of marriages of girls aged between 10 and 14 each year and continuing entrenched discrimination in law and practice." Iranian authorities have also failed to take steps against men who kill their wives or daughters and the legal age for marriage is 13, although men can obtain permission to marry their daughters and granddaughters earlier, said Amnesty International. This move will just serve to further discredit the UN and present it as an unhinged institution which is divorced from reality. Appointing Iran to the UN's Women's right council is like Appointing China or Russia to the Human rights council. Oh wait, the UN already did that. Not a single word of condemnation for this move by the UN was uttered by a female world leaders such as Angela Merkel, nor from any feminist "women's rights" groups. One can only imagine what Iranian women are thinking after hearing these news.