Sky News, April 30, 2010 – United Nations staff, aware that the joke about electing Libya to chair the Human Rights Council a few years back has become bit stale, have come up with a new one.
This one starts, ’Have you heard the one about Iran’s election to the UN Women Rights Council?’
Iran, having lost the battle for a place on the Human Rights Council, managed instead this week to get onto the ’Commission on the Status of Women’(CSW ) a body dedicated ‘exclusively to promote gender equality and advancement of women’.
Iran was ’elected’ by acclaim, meaning no-one voted, but no-one opposed membership in a classic UN stitch up by the Asian bloc. A campaign by women’s rights champions inside and outside Iran calling on the UN not to take this step fell on deaf ears.
Theoretically Iran will now join other enthusiastic upkeepers of human rights such as China and Congo, tirelessly working to ensure the safety and equality of women around the world, naming and shaming countries without fear or prejudice.
In practice the CSW has only ever issued one resolution condemning a country, and that country was Israel.
So a resolution drawing attention to some of Iran’s laws, germane to women, cannot be expected anytime soon. Instead the body charged with promoting women rights can be expected to tirelessly ignore some of the more interesting Iranian legal practices.
For example, Article 1133 of the Civil Code: A man can divorce his wife whenever he so chooses and does not have to give her advance notice. There are numerous others, laws requiring a women to have her husbands permission to get a passport, laws enforcing segregation in health care which results in too few women doctors being available to treat women etc.
A stand out law is Article 102 of the Penal code. Whoever wrote it appears to have been influenced by Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’ as it stipulates that a male adultery be buried up to his waist before being stoned to death, but a women be buried up to her neck. It continues – if the man escapes during the stoning, that’s the end of the matter, but if the women escapes, she must be arrested and killed by firing squad.
However, all is not lost for the women of Iran,. The penal code also states that if a man falsely accuses his wife of not being a virgin when they marry, he can receive 75 lashes. Of course she’d have to prove he accused her, and a women’s testimony is worth half a mans….
Many countries have similar laws, all of them are in the UN, and some of them are on women rights and human rights committees. Which says as much about the UN as it does about the offending states.