examiner.com, May 7, 2010 – Datelined New York and Washington, “International human rights and women’s rights leaders, attorneys, scholars, columnists, Iranian human rights activists, media figures, women in the arts, and other prominent women” “urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to denounce the recent election of Iran to the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.”

They asked her why she let Iran be seated on the commission by acclamation, without demanding a vote [and objecting, and voting nay, for the record].
The letter explained, “There are sickening and horrific videos, websites, documented reports of gang rapes, stoning, mutilations, hangings, beatings, burnings and other barbaric acts of violence, intimidation, and humiliation against the women of Iran.
Political dissidents, gays, non-Muslim minorities, apostates, and infidels are also targeted in widespread human rights violations and gruesome attacks — all these atrocities are egregious violations of the U.N. Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
It is not as the UN delegations were uninformed. A couple of hundred Iranian women sent them a message that in Iran, women have no right to choose their husbands and to education after marriage, to divorce, to child custody, and to protection from violence in public. Quotas restrict their college admission. They are arrested, beaten, and imprisoned for peaceful reform efforts.

Elections are not free and criminal trials are not fair and the judiciary is not independent. Security forces and vigilante auxiliaries held incommunicado, killed, raped, and tortured detainees and election protesters and political prisoners. Certainly no First Amendment or workers’ rights.