By any fair measure, the Islamic Republic of Iran is among the worst human rights violators in the world today. It executes more people than any country except China and it came 176th out of 180 in the 2024 World Press Freedom Index, to mention just two examples. This is reflected in the work of the United Nations human rights mechanisms which routinely cite Iran for these shortcomings. Not only is Iran one of just 13 countries in the world to have a dedicated UN Special Rapporteur (others include Afghanistan, North Korea and Belarus), there is even a full-time UN fact-finding mission looking into its brutal response to the 2022-2023 protests.
But even with such already low standards, the Iranian leadership must have been particularly embarrassed by a recent UN human rights report that criticized Iran for one thing the Islamic Republic itself likes to accuse Western countries of: racial and ethnic discrimination.
Published on August 23, the report was issued by the Committee of the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), a treaty body for the UN International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination. Parties to this convention include almost every country in the world. In other words: it can’t be accused of being led by or biased toward Western countries. Its members are independent human rights experts elected by all parties to the convention. And it is currently led by a Jamaican historian. Of its current 18 expert members, only three are from the West (US, Poland and Greece).
The convention has been in force since 1969 and Iran acceded to it under the Shah. Like every other member, Tehran must undergo regular assessment to see how well it is implementing the convention’s provisions. Last month, Iran was reviewed for the first time since 2010 and the resulting report found that things had become worse, not better, over the past 14 years.
Iran was being assessed alongside six other countries, including the United Kingdom, which itself was the subject of CERD’s “particular concern” due to “recurring racist acts and violence against ethnic and ethno-religious minorities, migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers by extremist far-right and white supremacist individuals and groups.”
But the findings of the committee were much more damning with respect to Iran. While it praised the country for some of its legislation and measures since 2010, including a 2015 decree which allows Afghan children to enroll in schools regardless of whether they are documented or not, the report decries “systematic and structural racial discrimination against members of ethnic and ethno-religious minority groups” and “persistent structural socio-economic inequalities.” It goes as far as accusing Iran of subjecting such groups to not only discrimination against minorities but “persecution for practicing their faith.”
The latter point provides a clue into the architecture of discrimination in Iran. As an authoritarian theocracy with Shia Islam as its official religion, Iran is known for heavy-handed repression of freedom of belief. This policy disproportionately affects ethnic minorities such as Kurds and Baluch who, in their vast majority, are Sunni Muslims, although ethnic minorities who are mostly Shia (such as Iran’s Turkic Azeris and Arabs) also suffer from discrimination including the deprivation of the right to study in their mother tongues.
A well-known form of racial hatred, anti-Semitism, is also prevalent in practices of the Iranian regime. The Islamic Republic’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and official mouthpieces deny the Holocaust and spread dangerous forms of this racism debunked by historians generations ago, such as the blood libel.
The CERD report addressed Iran’s general conditions, however, and specific issues such as these were not mentioned.
In fact, Kurds and Baluch are the only groups specifically named in the report. This is due to a particularly pernicious practice referenced in a CERD report for the first time: border killings. Iran’s Kurds and Baluch live, respectively, on Iran’s northwestern and southeastern border regions, and suffer from economic marginalization. One of their few economic lifeways is the border trade, with Iranian Kurds smuggling a variety of goods to and from Iraq while many Iranian Baluch are involved in a similar trade, usually of fuel, to Pakistan. But since this trade often breaks the law, because of unregulated border crossings and other issues, the authorities suppress it brutally with hundreds of couriers killed by border guards in recent years.
The CERD report raises the alarm on this situation and calls on Iran to change its policies on “the use of lethal force by law enforcement.” The report also says to minorities are “disproportionately subjected to arbitrary detention and sentenced to [the] death penalty.”
The exclusion of Iranian Sunnis from political power, also noted in the UN report, has been a topic of debate in the Iranian political mainstream in recent months. President Masoud Pezeshkian was born in a Kurdish-majority city, to a Kurdish Sunni mother, and he speaks the Kurdish language though he primarily identifies as a Shia Azeri. He cruised to victory in a July run-off election, partly on promises of better representation for minorities, and particularly Sunnis. But his new cabinet included zero Sunni ministers.
The exclusion of Sunni minister led to an outcry – including by Iran’s highest-regarded Sunni cleric Molavi Abdolhamid. Despite making up about 10 percent of the Iranian population, there have been no Sunni ministers or even Sunni provincial governors since 1979. Last week, Pezeshkian did made a gesture toward inclusion by appointing Abdolrahim Hosseinzadeh, a Kurdish Sunni MP, as Vice-President for Rural Development, making him the highest-ranking Sunni official since 1979.
But as the CERD report suggests, much more needs to be done for Iran to comply with its international obligations. The report asks Iran to take several measures and report back in a year. These include not only changes to law, including those used to “criminalize free expression,” but a change in Iran’s constitution, the provisions of which, the report says, violate at least three articles of the UN’s anti-racial discrimination treaty.
Islamic Republic leaders love to highlight the plight of Palestinians, African Americans or Canada’s First Nations people. But as the UN report suggests, they might be better advised to start closer to home.
