U.N. rights body orders probe into repression of protestsTehran rejects ‘politicized’ outcome in GenevaThousands killed in biggest crackdown since 1979 revolutionGENEVA, Jan 23 (Reuters) – The U.N. rights body condemned Iran on Friday for rights abuses and mandated an investigation into a recent crackdown on anti-government protests that killed thousands of people.

“I call on the Iranian authorities to reconsider, to pull back, and to end their brutal repression,” High Commissioner Volker Turk told an emergency session of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva, voicing concerns for detainees.

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The council passed a motion extending a previous inquiry set up in 2022 so U.N. investigators could also document the latest unrest “for potential future legal proceedings”.

Rights groups say bystanders were among those killed during the biggest crackdown since Shi’ite Muslim clerics took power in the 1979 revolution. “terrorists and rioters” backed by exiled opponents and foreign foes the U.S. and Israel.

Iran’s mission decried the rights council’s “politicised” resolution and rejected external interference, saying in a statement it had its own independent and robust accountability mechanisms to investigate “the root causes of recent events”.

Twenty-five states including France, Mexico and South Korea voted in favour, while seven including China and India voted against and 14 abstained.

“This is the worst mass murder in the contemporary history of Iran,” Payam Akhavan, a former U.N. prosecutor of Iranian-Canadian nationality, told the meeting. He called for a “Nuremberg moment”, referring to the international criminal trials of Nazi leaders following World War Two.

Iran’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, Ali Bahreini, told the Council its emergency session was invalid and gave Tehran’s tally of some 3,000 people killed in the unrest.

One Iranian official, however, has told Reuters that at least 5,000 people, including 500 members of the security forces, had been killed.

The U.S.-based HRANA rights group said it has so far verified 4,519 unrest-linked deaths and had 9,049 additional deaths under review.

China, Pakistan, Cuba and Ethiopia also questioned the utility of the rights session, with Beijing’s ambassador Jia Guide calling the unrest in Iran “a matter of internal affairs”.

It was unclear who would cover the costs of the extended U.N. inquiry amid a funding crisis that has stalled other probes.

Reporting by Olivia Le Poidevin and Emma Farge
Editing by Gareth Jones

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Emma Farge reports on the U.N. beat and Swiss news from Geneva since 2019. She has produced a string of exclusives on diplomacy, the environment and global trade and covered Switzerland’s first war crimes trial. Her Reuters career started in 2009 covering oil swaps from London and she has since written about the West African Ebola outbreak, embedded with U.N. troops in north Mali and was the first reporter to enter deposed Gambian dictator Yahya Jammeh’s estate. She co-authored a winning story for the Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Prize on Russia’s diplomatic isolation in 2022 and was also part of a team of journalists nominated in 2012 as Pulitzer finalists in the international reporting category for coverage of the Libyan revolution. She holds a BA from Oxford University (First) and an MSc from the LSE in International Relations. She is currently on the board of the press association for UN correspondents in Geneva (ACANU).