UN Human Rights Council to hold urgent Iran meeting on Friday

The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold an urgent special session this week on "the deteriorating human rights situation in the Islamic Republic of Iran", a spokesman said Tuesday.

It follows a request from Britain, Germany, Iceland, Moldova and North Macedonia and will take place on Friday, council spokesman Pascal Sim told reporters in Geneva.

In a letter addressed to the council's president and seen by AFP, the five countries highlighted "credible reports of alarming violence, crackdowns on protesters and violations of international human rights law across the country".

The request had received backing from more than the one-third of the council's 47 members needed for a special session to go ahead.

So far, 21 members are supporting the request, including Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Spain and Switzerland.

The request is also supported by 30 observer countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, Norway, Poland, Sweden and Ukraine.

Iran is reeling from some of the biggest anti-government protests in its history and a crackdown that monitors said has killed thousands.

The scale of the crackdown has emerged piecemeal as Iran remains under an unprecedented internet shutdown.

Despite difficulty accessing information, the Iran Human Rights non-governmental organisation says it has verified that 3,428 protesters were killed by security forces.

Iranian officials have not given an exact death toll.

The Human Rights Council already has Iran under scrutiny.

In November 2022, the UN's top rights body decided to launch an independent international fact-finding mission on Iran, to investigate alleged human rights violations related to the protests that began there in September that year.

Its mandate was renewed in April last year to investigate allegations of "recent and ongoing serious human rights violations in Iran".

The probe said earlier this month it was reviewing open-source materials, including video footage and photos of the recent protests and crackdown.

This will be the 39th special session of the Human Rights Council since it was founded in 2006.

The last was in November on El-Fasher in Sudan, with the previous one in February last year on the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Human Rights Council holds three regular sessions a year, over a minimum of 10 weeks in total.

The next regular session is scheduled to be held from 23 February to 2 April.