Iran dismisses UN rights resolution as 'unacceptable'

Iran's Foreign Ministry on Thursday dismissed a new resolution by the UN on the rights situation in Iran as "unacceptable and politically-motivated", Tasnim news agency reported.

Supports for such a politically motivated resolution from war criminals and sponsors of terrorism have discredited it, Foreign Ministry Spokesman Bahram Qasemi said in a statement.

"The support of a number of most notorious violators of human rights and war criminals and sponsors of terrorism, violence, and extremism for the UN's latest resolution is only one of the main reasons showing why the resolution is invalid," Qasemi said without elaboration.

"Western countries' instrumental, selective, and political use of human rights against independent states of the world is a wrong and condemned approach and has no result other than undermining the supreme status of human rights," he was quoted as saying.

The recent anti-Iran resolution sponsored by Canada and passed by the UN's Third Committee on Social, Humanitarian and Cultural Affairs has voiced concern about what it calls human rights violations in Iran.

Iran is a ruling system based on religious democracy which has always sought to promote human rights and to seriously fulfil its international commitments, the spokesperson said.

"Iran is ready to seriously establish dialogue and constructive cooperation with any other side interested in promoting human rights based on its supreme values and the principle of mutual respect... within all the legal international mechanisms," Qasemi added.

--IANS

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