UN launches Iran human rights investigation

The United Nations' top human rights body on Thursday decided by a comfortable margin to establish a new investigative mission to probe Iran's suppression of mass protests that have roiled the country since September.

The motion passed with 25 in favour, six against and 16 abstentions. Activists cheered after the result was read out by the council president and some diplomats applauded.

Tehran's representative at the Geneva meeting Khadijeh Karimi earlier accused Western states of using the rights council to target Iran, a move she called "appalling and disgraceful".

Iran has been rocked by more than two months of protests sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman arrested by the morality police for supposedly wearing her hijab inappropriately. The Iranian authorities have said their inquiry showed she died from natural causes due to a pre-existing condition. Her family allege she was beaten.

Iranian authorities have grown increasingly heavy-handed in their response to the demonstrations as they have spread across the country and swelled into a broad movement against the theocracy that has ruled Iran since 1979.

Before the vote the UN high commissioner for human rights, Volker Türk, had warned that “a fully fledged human rights crisis” was taking place in Iran and urged its government to end the disproportionate use of force against protesters.

The UN has never set up such a powerful mechanism in respect of Iran before. Western powers have been imposing asset freezes and travel bans on individual security agents behind the repression, but in practice these sanctions have little impact.