“Today, we removed that stain,” US Ambassador to the UN, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, declared in reference to Iran’s expulsion from the UN’s Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in December. The deciding vote on the matter in the UN Economic and Social Council followed an American diplomatic campaign to see Iran stripped of its capacity to derive legitimacy from its participation in the world’s foremost body on women’s rights while leading a violent crackdown on a women-led protest movement within its own borders. 

This official justification offered by US officials—centered on the ways in which Iran’s presence undermined the credibility of the entire commission—was supported by an influential group of high-profile Iranian activists and women’s rights organizations. Yet, the US decision to pursue Iran’s removal was clearly not insulated from the broader political battle between the two states, including the American desire to push Iran further to the margins of the international community.  

To this point, the American National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan, described the decision as “another sign of the growing international consensus on Iran.” However, the eventual vote to expel Iran was not unanimous: 29 states were in favor, 16 abstained, and eight (including Russia, China, and Oman) voted against the US-sponsored resolution. Even beyond the halls of the UN, traditional foes of Iran have not capitalized on this diplomatic defeat to criticize the Islamic Republic, and American partners in the MENA region (with the obvious exception of Israel) have been largely silent on the Iran vote.

These dynamics challenge the American claim of consensus on two levels. First, the calculations of states deciding whether to speak out in favor of the American resolution were tied to current political dynamics, and regional states are wary of wading into the situation in Iran given nascent efforts at regional rapprochement, along with the prospect of similar types of unrest within their own borders. Second, the concept of women’s rights remains a political battleground in and of itself and is very far from becoming an organizing principle for political consensus in the region. 

The Current Politics of Women’s Rights

The American campaign to strip Iran of CSW membership emerged against a backdrop of increased international attention on women’s rights, which focused on the demands of women protesters in Iran and successive Taliban directives banning women from universities and other sectors of public life. The elevation of these issues to the top of the international agenda in late 2022 forced countries to take sides on women’s rights like never before, and global outrage ensued, with many world leaders rushing to condemn both the Iranian government and the Taliban.  

Indeed, a number of Arab states (including those that have sought to maintain some lines of communication with the Taliban-led government) spoke out forcefully against the most recent Taliban decisions. Saudi Arabia expressed “astonishment and regret,” and Qatar, positioning itself as a “Muslim country in which women enjoy all their rights,” issued its own condemnation. Yet, these countries have not put forward direct statements regarding the situation of women’s rights in Iran despite the international outcry, their silence indicating a collective reluctance to become implicated in international debates on women’s rights that hit a little closer to home. 

During a November Security Council meeting on the situation in Iran, the representative of the UAE called for restraint, but did not single Iran out for its treatment of women, instead maintaining that “restrictions on women. . . are an epidemic of global proportions.” While this statement is clearly true in the abstract, its delivery at a hearing on Iran’s specific violations is striking in its obvious intent to deflect, especially considering the UAE’s targeted response to violations in Afghanistan. In October, the UAE’s permanent representative was emphatic, contending that current patterns of exclusion in Afghanistan could lead to “gender apartheid.” 

However, the Arab states were not the only ones to be apprehensive about publicly supporting the US-led campaign to remove Iran. A diverse group of countries, including many critics of the Iranian government’s policies, exhibited skepticism regarding the legality of the move, as well as the precedent it would set for politically motivated maneuvering. To others, it also appeared that Iran was being singled out for violations on a commission in which states characterized by severe women’s rights violations are well-represented; other current members include Somalia and Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia—which aroused similar outrage from rights organizations following its 2017 election to the CSW—is poised to begin a new stint on the commission in March upon the closing of the body’s sixty-seventh session. 

While Riyadh is largely protected from censure by American diplomats, critics have not been swayed by reforms regarding women’s rights advanced by the Crown Prince in recent years. Saudi Arabia’s official silence on Iran’s removal reveals that kingdom officials are self-aware enough to avoid leveling critiques that could just as easily be used to condemn their own record on women’s rights.   

Overall, there is more than one stain on the commission’s credibility, and the United States is perhaps not the most well-positioned actor to oversee a stain removal process, considering the American Supreme Court’s recent rollback of reproductive freedoms—ironically, a point that Iranian diplomats cannot press given their own government’s position on abortion. 

The Risks of Finger-Pointing 

In a defiant response to his country’s expulsion, the Iranian representative seemed to grasp that the strongest point of defense for Iran is located in the imperfect records of others. To this end, he cited the treatment of Palestinian women by Israel and the setbacks faced by Afghan women following the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. The Russian representative attempted to offer further support for the Iranian position by pointing to killings carried out by American police, including—in a bizarre false equivalence—the death of Ashli Babbitt, the American woman who was shot by police during her participation in the January 6th storming of the US Capitol.

Regardless of these attempts to illustrate the purportedly hypocritical treatment of Iran, the Islamic Republic does remain an outlier on one prominent metric: it is one of only a handful of states across the globe that has not taken any action on the primary international treaty for women’s rights, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). (Notably, the other main character in this latest battle—the United States—has signed but not ratified the treaty.) 

However, while all Arab League states except Sudan and Somalia have ratified or acceded to CEDAW, the persistence of extensive reservations to the treaty in the Arab region points to continued controversy on some of the most consequential matters, especially in relation to women’s rights within the family regarding marriage, inheritance, and the passage of citizenship to children, for instance. 

Iran performs poorly on prominent gender equality indices, but most of its Arab neighbors are close by in the lowest ranked percentiles. For this reason, there is a fairly strong norm of non-interference on women’s rights among regional states—even feuding ones—as many points emphasized by international criticism are shared across the region. Avoiding thorny international conversations about women’s rights (including the status of the hijab—a topic which has animated the current movement in Iran yet remains a sensitive societal topic in the region and globally) is in each state’s best interest, regardless of other political disagreements. 

High-Stakes Exclusion

In the same remarks cited in the first paragraph, Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield puzzled over Iran’s interest in remaining a member of the CSW in the first place: “The Iranians were unnerved by this. . . the fact that they were there, and they protested – they clearly, for reasons that are not clear to me, want to be on this council.” 

The Ambassador’s likely feigned confusion aside, the reason that Iran was insistent on remaining a member of the commission is clear: debates on women’s rights are at the center of international politics—substantively and rhetorically. That is not a comfortable place to be excluded from. 

Most states agree on so-called easy issues—checking yes, for instance, on the question of whether girls should be allowed to attend school. The Taliban-led government is such a pariah, and its policies so regressive, that condemning Taliban actions is not a difficult political proposition. But this case is unique in the complex global politics of women’s rights. Under international law, women’s rights are not relative, but the politics surrounding them in UN bodies—and in the international system more broadly—certainly are.

Kaitlyn Hashem is the Assistant Editor of Sada Journal. Follow her on Twitter: @KaitHashem.