December 29, 2017
The United Nations last week adopted its usual annual condemnation of Iran for human rights violations, with only 30 countries supporting Iran, tied for the lowest support Iran has received in the 21st Century.
The vote was 81-to-30 with 70 abstentions, a record number of abstentions as Muslim-majority countries that once supported Iran pealed away and abstained. The loss of support for Iran among Muslim-majority countries points to growing opposition to Iran as it throws its weight around the Islamic world.
The 81 votes against Iran was nowhere near the record of 89 countries that voted to condemn Iran in 2011. The 30 countries that voted against Iran tied the low vote supporting Iran that same year.
Of the 57 countries in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), only 14 supported Iran. An unheard of eight actually voted to condemn Iran while 32 abstained and three skipped the vote.
The eight who openly voted against Iran are: Albania, Bahrain, Burkina Faso, Djibouti, the Maldives, Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Yemen.
Of Iran’s seven land neighbors, five voted with Iran while the other two—Armenia and Turkey—pointedly absented themselves from the vote.
As every year since 2003, Canada drafted and sponsored the resolution against Iran. Canada took on that role after Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian dual national, was beaten to death in Evin prison.
Many of the countries that abstained spoke out during the debate to criticize Iran’s human rights conduct, but justified their abstentions by saying they were trying to encourage Iran to cooperate with the UN in improving human rights conditions. Iran normally tells its own people that the abstainers actually support Iran but don’t wish to offend the major Western powers.
Tajikistan, where Farsi is the national language, has had an increasingly troubled relationship with Iran, which has supported an Islamic opposition group in the country. Tajikistan voted with Iran when the resolution was taken up in a UN committee last month, but it abstained in the General Assembly this month, suggesting the government remains irked with Tehran.
Serbia, a state hostile to Islam but which Iran firmly supports largely at the behest of Russia, voted against Iran in the committee last month but absented itself from the General Assembly when the voted was taken this month.
Besides the Muslim-majority supporters and its neighbors, Iran was importantly supported by Russia, China, India and South Africa. The remaining supporters were mostly states on the outs of the international system, such as Bolivia, Cuba, North Korea, Eritrea, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela and Zimbabwe.