The National Human Rights Authority expressed deep regret over the outcomes of the emergency session held by the United Nations Human Rights Council on January 23 regarding the situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
In a statement on Saturday, the Authority highlighted the session’s selective rush to activate mechanisms of investigation and accountability, contrasting with a suspicious silence and deliberate neglect of documented crimes of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity committed in plain sight in the Gaza Strip, and for more than ten years in Yemen.
The Authority reaffirmed its fundamental rejection of any human rights violations wherever they occur, noting that the events in the Islamic Republic of Iran no longer fall within the framework of peaceful protests guaranteed under international law. Rather, according to documented and publicly available reports, they have escalated into organized violence, terrorist attacks, sabotage of public and private facilities, and armed operations targeting civilians and law enforcement forces.
The statement emphasized that any responsible human rights assessment must clearly distinguish between the legitimate right to peaceful expression and terrorist or destructive acts that threaten public safety and endanger civilian lives.
The Authority considered the Council’s behavior as reflecting blatant double standards and systematic political hypocrisy, which has transformed the international human rights system into a selective tool used out of context as a pretext to justify foreign interventions or political escalation, while entirely overlooking documented crimes of genocide, aggression, and blockade in Gaza and Yemen without any serious accountability.
The statement stressed that the Yemeni people have endured ten years of aggression and blockade by the United States, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, resulting in widespread civilian deaths, destruction of infrastructure, and systematic starvation—representing one of the gravest cases of impunity in modern times, amid the Human Rights Council’s failure to take any serious or proportionate measures given the scale of the crimes.
It also described the war of extermination in Gaza as a stark moral test for the international community, where mass atrocities are committed against civilians, and siege and starvation are used as weapons of war without genuine accountability or deterrent measures.
The Authority held the Human Rights Council and states supporting the aggression against Yemen, as well as states obstructing accountability in Gaza, morally and legally responsible for the continuation of these crimes and for entrenching a policy of impunity.
The statement called for ending the double standards in the work of the Human Rights Council, opening genuine accountability pathways regarding genocide crimes in Gaza, reactivating international investigation mechanisms into the crimes of aggression and blockade in Yemen, and the immediate and unconditional lifting of the blockade on Yemen and Gaza.
