White House moves to punish Iran at the UN amid calls for response to Mahsa Amini protests

The divide between Washington and Tehran is growing as the White House announced on Wednesday that it would seek Iran’s removal from a key United Nations council in response to a crackdown against women’s rights protesters in the country.

Vice President Kamala Harris said on Twitter that the Biden administration would seek that Iran be ousted from the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the body’s leading watchdog on women’s rights. It’s a move that will have little global impact beyond embarrassing the Iranian government at a time when it appears to be at its least stable point in recent memory and is grappling with growing protests spearheaded by younger Iranians around the country.

New video shows security forces battling with demonstrators at a university in the country; news reports indicate that the protests have spread from Tehran to cities around the country. The resulting crackdown by the government is already thought to have killed dozens.

“Today we are announcing our intention to remove Iran from the UN Commission on the Status of Women. Given Iran’s brutal crackdown on women and girls protesting peacefully for their rights, Iran is unfit to serve on this Commission,” wrote Ms Harris. “To the protestors: we see you and we hear you.”

It’s a move that comes just as more than 2,000 tenured professors, academic leaders and other higher education faculty across the US have signed on to a letter to President Joe Biden urging him to support protesters in Iran, particularly university students who have spearheaded demonstrations at several major schools.

Spurring on the students’ anger is the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman who is thought to have been killed in police custody after being detained for wearing a headscarf incorrectly. So far, demonstrations have been recorded at Azad University, the University of Tehran, the Sanandaj Technical College for Girls, and other schools. Protesters have been heard chanting anti-government slogans including “death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the Supreme Leader” as well as “It’s not the time for mourning. It’s time for anger,” according to various news outlets.

“Iranians on college campuses or the streets deserve to enjoy similar rights as we have in the United States,” said Hossein Sadeghpour, a professor of molecular and optical physics who leads an institute on the subjects at Harvard.

The letter’s signatories want the Biden administration to go further than just publicly humiliating the Iranian government, and urged the president in their message to end all negotiations with Tehran, bringing an end to the effort to resume the 2015 nuclear deal signed under the Obama administration and abandoned by Donald Trump.

“We urgently ask that you halt any and all negotiations with the Iranian regime, and prevent any sanctions relief under any pretext, directly or indirectly, until all violators of human rights in Iran are held accountable. We also ask you to recognize the universally accepted right of the Iranian people to self-defense as they seek to attain sovereignty and self-determination,” reads the letter.

That demand for a complete end to talks likely won’t be met, but the White House has indicated as recently as October that negotiations over the nuclear accord had stalled.

“The door for diplomacy will always remain open, but as of now we don’t see a deal coming together any time soon,” Karine Jean-Pierre said from behind the White House press podium on 17 October.

Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iran’s response to the growing unrest may be to seek military conflict abroad. According to US government sources as well as their counterparts in the Saudi government, intelligence suggests that Iran’s military forces may seek to strike Saudi Arabia or Iraqi Kurdistan in the coming days as Tehran continues to blame both the West and Saudi Arabia for supposedly fomenting the protests.