(CNSNews.com) – As the U.N. Human Rights Council began a five-week session in Geneva on Monday, the foreign ministers of China and Iran contended that human rights should be viewed in the light of each country’s particular context and circumstances.
While other delegates highlighted the universal norms contained in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), adopted 75 years ago, Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang argued for a different approach.
“Countries vary from one another in historical background, cultural heritage, national conditions and needs of the people,” he said in a video statement. “There is no one-size-fits-all model in the protection of human rights.”
Qin said that every country’s right to choose its own path of human rights development should be respected.
“Blindly copying the model of others would be ill-fitted for one’s own conditions, and imposing one’s model upon others would entail endless troubles.”
Western governments accuse China of mass-scale abuses against minority Muslim Uyghurs and others in Xingang, with the U.S. and several others determining that the atrocities rise to the level of crimes against humanity and genocide.
Beijing also stands accused of stifling of democracy in Hong Kong, and of violating the rights of Tibetan Buddhists, underground Christians, political dissidents, and others.
Qin charged that “some forces with hidden agenda keep hyping up issues related to China’s Xinjiang and Tibet, in an attempt to smear China and suppress its development.”
“No country is qualified to act as the judge on human rights, and human rights should not be used as a pretext for meddling in other countries’ internal affairs or holding back other countries’ development,” he said, adding that China opposes actions by some parties to “politicize, weaponize and instrumentalize human rights issues.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian also addressed Monday’s opening segment of the HRC session, and similarly pushed back at critics of the regime.
“No state or a group of states should entitle themselves to claim exclusive ownership of human rights,” he said. “Nor should any state coerce others into submitting to any self-styled interpretation of human rights.”
Western democracies have led international condemnation of the regime’s harsh crackdown on protests that began last September after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, who had been arrested by the morality police enforcing strict hijab rules. More than 600 protestors have been killed over the five months since.
In his address, Amirabdollahian portrayed the unrest as the result of external agitation.
“The peaceful assemblies that took place in my country following the sad death of Mahsa Amini manifested the Iranian spirit of solidarity for a fellow young Iranian woman,” he said.
“However, those peaceful assemblies turned violent following the malign interference by some terrorist elements. In this respect, a number of Persian-language TV channels based in the United States and the U.K., acted as propagators of violence.”
Amirabdollahian also accused “some states” of financial and other assistance to “violent and terrorist elements.”
Rights are ‘universal’
A number of Western delegates walked out of the chamber as the Iranian began to speak. State Department spokesman Ned Price said the U.S. ambassador was among those who had not been present during Amirabdollahian’s statement.
Reacting to his comment about some countries pushing a “self-styled interpretation of human rights,” Price said that “this is an excuse that we often hear from countries with the worst human rights records around the world – claiming that human rights are subjective, and they need to be context-dependent.”
“The Universal Declaration on Human Rights – the first word is universal,” he said, adding that there are rights that belong to every person, whether in the U.S., Iran, or any other country.
More broadly, Price said the appearance at the HRC of a foreign minister of a regime with a “deplorable” human rights record “serves as a disturbing reminder to the world of the hypocrisy of the Iranian regime as it continues to violently suppress what are peaceful protests, and flout the international community’s calls for accountability.”
While China is a member of the 47-seat HRC, Iran is not. But the opening of the council’s regular sessions three times a year provides the opportunity for all U.N. member-states to deliver a statement, often at the level of foreign minister.
Russia, which was suspended from the HRC last April over the invasion of Ukraine, will be represented by one of its deputy foreign ministers, Sergey Ryabkov, on Thursday, several hours after Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to address the council by video.
This year’s membership of the U.N.’s top human rights body includes the smallest contingent of free democracies in the council’s history. Of the 47 elected members, just 14 are countries graded as “free” by the democracy watchdog Freedom House.