Tehran, Iran – The Iranian state has rejected a resolution by the United Nations’ Human Rights Council that strongly condemned the “violent crackdown on peaceful protests” by security forces that left thousands dead.
After a detailed meeting and discussions in Geneva on Friday, 25 members of the council, including France, Japan and South Korea, voted in favour of the censure resolution.
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Seven votes against, including from China, India and Pakistan, as well as 14 abstentions, among others from Qatar and South Africa, failed to stop the resolution.
The human rights council called on Iran to stop the arrests of people in connection with the protests, and to take steps to “prevent extrajudicial killing, other forms of arbitrary deprivation of life, enforced disappearance, sexual and gender-based violence” and other actions violating its human rights obligations.
Iran said that the Western-led sponsors of the emergency meeting on Friday had never genuinely cared for human rights in Iran, or else they would not have imposed sanctions that have devastated the Iranian population over the past decade.
Ali Bahreini, Iran’s envoy in the meeting, reiterated the state’s claim that 3,117 people were killed during the unrest, 2,427 of whom were killed by “terrorists” armed and funded by the United States, Israel and their allies.
“It was ironic that states whose history was stained with genocide and war crimes now attempted to lecture Iran on social governance and human rights,” he said.
The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA) says it has confirmed at least 5,137 deaths during the protests, and is investigating 12,904 others.
UN special rapporteur on Iran, Mai Sato, has said the death toll could reach 20,000 or more as reports from doctors from inside Iran emerge. Al Jazeera has been unable to independently verify the figures.
UN human rights chief Volker Turk told the council that “the brutality in Iran continued, creating conditions for further human rights violations, instability and bloodshed” weeks after the killings on January 8 and January 9, when a communications blackout was also enforced.
Turk pointed out that executions for murder, drug-related and other charges continue across Iran, with the state executing at least 1,500 people in 2025, marking an enormous 50 percent increase compared with the year before.
Payam Akhavan, a professor and former UN prosecutor of Iranian-Canadian nationality who was at Friday’s meeting as a civil society representative, called the killings “the worst mass-murder in the contemporary history of Iran”.
He said as a prosecutor at the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, he had helped draft the indictment for the Srebrenica genocide in which some 8,000 Bosniaks were killed in July 1995.
“By comparison, at least twice that number had been killed in Iran in half the time. This was an extermination,” he said.
The adopted UN council resolution also extended the mandate of the special rapporteur for another year, while adding two more years to the mandate of the independent fact-finding mission that was formed to investigate killings and rights abuses during Iran’s nationwide protests in 2022 and 2023.
More videos emerge despite internet blackout
Meanwhile, the internet blackout continues to be enforced amid growing frustration and anger from the public and businesses alike.
Global internet observatory Netblocks reported that international internet remained effectively blocked on Saturday despite brief moments of connectivity.
Some users have been able to overcome the digital blackout over recent days for short periods of time using a variety of proxies and virtual private networks (VPNs).
The limited number of users who have managed to get online, whether by using a combination of circumvention tools or leaving the country’s borders, continue to upload horrifying footage of killings during the protests.
International human rights bodies like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have attested that many of the reviewed videos show state forces firing live ammunition at protesters, including from heavy machineguns.
The state rejects all such accounts, claiming that security forces only fired at “terrorists” and “rioters” who attacked government offices and burned public property.
Threat of war looms
The back and forth over one of Iran’s bloodiest chapters since its 1979 revolution continues as the threat of war looms large over the embattled 90-million-strong nation once again.
US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to intervene in Iran if it kills protesters. Washington is moving the USS Abraham Lincoln supercarrier, along with its strike group of supporting vessels, towards the Middle East in a move that has raised fears of more US strikes on Iran in the aftermath of the 12-day war with Israel in June.
More US military aircraft, including fighter jets, have also been deployed to the region despite interventions from regional powers in an attempt to prevent an escalation.
Top Iranian authorities continue to send defiant messages to US President Donald Trump amid the rapid military buildup.
“He [Trump] certainly says many things,” Majid Mousavi, the new aerospace chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), told state television on Saturday. “He can be certain that we will respond to him in the field of battle”.
“He can say better things even if he is trying to escape the wishes of others who want to impose things on him,” said Ali Shamkhani, a top security official and representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the newly formed Supreme Defence Council.
One of Iran’s top judicial authorities also shot back at Trump after the US president last week called for the end of Khamenei’s 37-year-rule in the country.
“These acts of insolence and audacity are, in our view, tantamount to a declaration of all-out war, and based on this approach, in the event of any aggression, US interests around the world will be exposed to threat by supporters of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” said Mohammad Movahedi, the hardline cleric who heads the prosecutor general’s authority.