Outrage over Iran minister’s presence at UN rights meet

Critics voice outrage that Iran’s justice minister will travel to Geneva next week to address the UN’s top human rights body, despite facing Swiss and EU sanctions over rights violations.

Brussels and Bern have slapped sanctions on Alireza Avayi, maintaining that, as Tehran’s former top prosecutor, he was “responsible for human rights violations, arbitrary arrests, denials of prisoners’ rights, and an increase in executions.”

According to exiled members of the Iranian opposition, he played a key role in a 1988 massacre of political prisoners.

“Allowing Avayi to address the Human Rights Council is disgraceful and would make a mockery of the United Nations and its human rights mechanisms,” says Shahin Gobadi, a member of the National Council of Resistance of Iran.

— AFP

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