The vote in the 49-member council was 22-to-5 with 20 abstentions. Russia, China, Cuba, Bangladesh and Qatar were the five voting against renewal.
Iran’s ambassador to the UN offices in Geneva, Mohammad-Reza Sajjadi, charged that human rights were being used as a pretext to advance the political interests of certain, unnamed states.
The council also extended the term of the special rapporteur for North Korea for another year.
In Tehran before the vote on Iran, Sadeq Larijani, the chairman of the Judiciary, denounced all the talk about Iran’s human rights compliance as a Western ploy.
“If Western governments respected human rights, they would not have kept silent on the massacre of people in Bahrain, Afghanistan and other parts of the world,” he said, ignoring the annual US human rights reports that criticize compliance with human rights standards in many dozens of countries, including US allies.
Larijani cited the recent murder of 16 Afghans in their homes by an American sergeant as an example of US human rights violations, portraying that crime as if it were sanctioned by the US government.
Larijani said US standards on human rights are not the Islamic standards by which Iran abides. But Shaheed’s report said the Islamic Republic not only violated international standards on human rights, but also its own laws on such things as torture, detention and free trials.