The United Nations just nominated the Islamic Republic of Iran to its Committee for Program and Coordination, a body that shapes global policy on women’s rights, human rights, disarmament, and terrorism prevention.
This is not a clerical error. This is not a technicality. This is a choice.
And the nations that backed it include the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, Finland, and Spain.
Let that sink in.
The regime that beats women in the streets for showing their hair. The government whose morality police arrested Mahsa Amini in September 2022 for an improperly worn hijab and killed her in custody, sparking a nationwide uprising. The theocracy that responded to those protests by massacring hundreds of its own citizens, including children, and imprisoning tens of thousands more. The state where the legal marriage age for girls is thirteen. The government where four male witnesses are required to convict a rapist, and where the woman who cannot produce them may face eighty lashes for a false accusation.
That government now helps shape the world’s human rights agenda.
Here is the history you need to know, because this is not the first time.
In 2021, Iran was elected to the UN Commission on the Status of Women, described by the UN itself as the principal global body dedicated to gender equality and the empowerment of women. The outcry was immediate and justified. UN Watch called it like making an arsonist the town fire chief. Then the Mahsa Amini protests happened. The images of Iran’s crackdown circled the globe. The killing was too public to ignore. In December 2022, the United States pushed a resolution through ECOSOC and Iran was removed from that body with 29 votes in favor.
The world applauded. Lessons were learned. Never again.
Eighteen months later, Iran was quietly nominated again to a different UN body covering the same subject matter.
Now, in April 2026, in the middle of an active military campaign by the United States and Israel to dismantle the very nuclear and terrorist apparatus this regime funds, the same Western governments that claim to be our partners have backed Iran’s nomination to yet another committee.
Ask yourself why the timing looks like this.
The answer is not complicated. There is a faction within the foreign policy establishments of Europe and Canada that despises Donald Trump more than it cares about Iranian women. They will not say that out loud. They will dress it up in multilateralist language about engagement and institutional integrity. But the practical effect of their vote is this: they handed the regime currently under military pressure a seat at the table of civilized nations to score a procedural point against an American president they cannot stand.
That is not principle. That is wickedness dressed in a diplomat’s suit.
The women of Iran have been paying the price for this kind of moral cowardice for decades. The girl arrested for her hair. The mother who watched her son shot in the street. The activist doing years in Evin Prison for the crime of demanding dignity. They do not get to vote on which UN committee their oppressors join. They do not get a press release.
They get a cell.
And the governments of France and Germany and Canada look at all of that and write yes on a ballot for Iran.
The United States sends roughly 1.3 billion dollars to the United Nations every year. We fund the building. We fund the staff. We fund the committees. We underwrite the institutional machinery that just handed a seat on a human rights body to a government we are currently in conflict with because it terrorizes its own people and exports violence across the region.
Defund it. Not reform it. Not threaten it. Defund it, and stop pretending that nations willing to elevate Iran to shape human rights policy are allies worth treating as allies.
You do not get to back rapists and killers to own Trump and then ask for American goodwill in the next breath.
The women of Iran deserved better from this institution. They deserved better from the governments that claim to speak for human rights. They have been betrayed again, in public, by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
Say their names. Defund the UN. And remember which governments just told you, with their votes, exactly where they stand.
Clayton Wood is a Knoxville lawyer, pastor and contributing writer for TriStar Daily.
Author
