Iran and Saudis likely joining UN women's rights agency

From AP:

Iran, where a woman convicted of adultery has been sentenced to death by stoning, is likely to become a member of the board of the new U.N. agency to promote equality for women, prompting outrage from the U.S. and human rights groups.

Some rights groups are also upset that Saudi Arabia, where women are not allowed to drive and are barred from many facilities used by men, is also vying to join the governing body of UN Women.

The General Assembly resolution adopted in July that merged four U.N. bodies dealing with women's issues into a single agency with greater clout to represent half the world's population calls for a 41-member executive board, with 35 members chosen by regional groups and six representing donor nations.

The Asian group has put forward an uncontested 10-nation slate that includes Iran, U.N. diplomats said, and Saudi Arabia has been selected for one of two slots for emerging donor nations.

Robin Shepard comments:

This is as big a farce as the dictatorship-ridden UN Human Rights Council. But, more than that, it provides yet another illustration of the impossibility of squaring notions of multilateralist, global governance with liberal-democratic principles. Whatever one’s views of the Bush administration, which pulled out of the Human Rights Council, this is one point they understood with complete clarity. Sadly, that is something one can’t necessarily say of their successors who seem almost as bemused as the hapless Europeans.

Zvi notes in the comments:

The western world insists on pretending that the UN - which due to its inclusion of non-democratic and brutal regimes is fundamentally a non-democratic organization - is able to advance human rights. It insists on granting undue influence to blocs of dictatorships. But the fact that dictators protect themselves and their allies from even modest censure by holding seats on the UNHRC, while turning the UNHRC into a political weapon against Israel, shows that this insistence is not only unhelpful, but actually kills people.

Now Islamist regimes are applying the same lesson with regard to UN Women.

The stench of hypocrisy is overpowering.