August 16, 2024
Dr. Mai Sato, a Japaneseborn human rights specialist, has been appointed the United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran by the UN Human Rights Council. Sato, currently an associate professor at Monash University in Australia, took up her UN post August 1, succeeding Dr. Javaid Rehman, a Pakistani lawyer, who worked as the rapporteur for the maximum of six years.
Sato, a social scientist from Japan, holds a PhD from King’s College London and previously worked at the University of Reading, the University of Oxford, and the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, all in the UK. Her work has focused on the use of the death penalty in India, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, the Philippines and Zimbabwe. She also founded CrimeInfo, a non-governmental organization that promotes the abolition of the death penalty in Japan.
The Islamic Republic is the second most active country after China for its use of the death penalty and is the world’s most active executioner of women and children.
It is likely that Sato will investigate this form of punishment in Iran and make it a central part of her work as rapporteur. “My human rights research focuses on maximizing the integrity of justice systems, particularly concerning the death penalty and the legitimacy of courts and police,” Sato said in her official application for the role, which was published on the council’s website.
“My work is particularly relevant to the human rights situation in Iran,” she said. “I will endeavor to contribute to the greater observance of human rights by monitoring and investigating human rights violations in Iran, raising public awareness, and acting on individual cases of reported violations.
While acknowledging past limitations in conducting country visits, I remain committed to engaging in constructive dialogue, mindful that the aim is to bolster Iran’s capacity to comply with human rights obligations for all Iranians.” The Islamic Republic has a policy of forbidding successive UN rapporteurs on human rights from visiting the country.
Sato’s work on Iran includes a forthcoming 2024 publication titled “Normative legitimacy of MAI SATO . . . new at UN Iran’s capital drug law and its application,” co-authored by Sato and Leavides Cabarrubias, and participation in a 2023 event about violence against women and children in Iran, organized by Australia’s Parliament.
The newly elected rapporteur is well-known among academics and human rights bodies. “Mai is an incredibly dedicated and compassionate antideath penalty advocate, who has done an enormous amount of work in Australia and elsewhere to draw attention to the issue of capital punishment, including in Iran,” Professor Kylie Moore Gilbert, an Australian academic previously detained in the Islamic Republic, told Iran International July 11. Sato’s predecessor, Rehman, grew increasingly concerned by the Iranian government’s use of the death penalty, particularly against women and children.
“There are extensive, vague and arbitrary grounds in Iran for imposing the death sentence, which quickly can turn this punishment into a political tool,” Rehman told the UN General Assembly in 2021 as he delivered his fourth annual report. “In addition, the structural flaws of the justice system are so deep and at odds with the notion of rule of law that one can barely speak of a justice system,” he said.
“The entrenched flaws in law and in the administration of the death penalty in Iran mean that most, if not all, executions are an arbitrary deprivation of life.” Iranian officials accused him of furthering a Western agenda and denounced his reports as untruthful.
