Iran and the UN’s Contribution to Undermining International Law

The quip that even a broken clock tells the right time twice a day is probably the most accurate way to describe the statement¹ released by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNOHCHR) regarding Iran.

In the statement, against the backdrop of tens of thousands of protesters being murdered in the streets, the UNOHCHR noted that in response to the “shocking recent events in Iran,” the international community should give priority to “gathering evidence and establishing whether human rights violations and crimes under international law, including crimes against humanity, may have occurred.” The statement continued by noting that “use of lethal force in law enforcement is subject to extremely strict criteria under international human rights law. Intentional lethal force can only be used as a last resort when it is strictly necessary to protect life against an imminent threat.”

Despite mounting evidence of mass killings and an international consensus on the plight of the Iranian people under the regime of the ayatollahs, the UNOHCHR, which holds a prominent human rights position in the UN, responded by initiating an evidence-gathering process and restating principles concerning the policing of demonstrations in democracies. The statement appeared to presume that the ayatollahs, responsible for violence against the Iranian people, would be influenced by the UNOHCHR’s position.

The situation becomes even more concerning.

While failing to provide the Iranian people with even the most basic moral support for their struggle to free themselves from the theocratic butchers of Tehran, the UNOHCHR then took the opportunity to positively condemn the efforts of President Trump and the United States.

In the face of the military build-up in preparation for a potential strike in Iran, the UNOHCHR, in a typical, hypocritical attempt by the UN to show balance, noted “In this regard, we underscore that threats or acts of unilateral military intervention by third States are contrary to international law.”

In other words, while hardly providing any iota of support for the Iranian people, and while remaining vague as to whether the events in Iran might or might not be human rights violations and international law crimes, the UNOHCHR decisively and solemnly declared that outside intervention on behalf of the Iranian people is a breach of international law. In effect, the UNOHCHR is putting President Trump and the entire international community on notice: Do nothing to intervene on behalf of the Iranians being slaughtered in the streets, or face the consequences of breaching international law.

Indeed, definitive legal justification for the U.S., and perhaps other interventions, in Iran may be somewhat vague.

Iran has not openly carried out an “armed attack” against the U.S. or other countries that could possibly warrant a military response and military intervention of the nature being considered.

True, Iran has been heading an axis of evil for many years, with its terrorist proxies operating around the globe. That reality has been true for decades, and has never been perceived as the justification for widespread military intervention against the Ayatollahs. It is similarly true that while some reports have indicated that the Iranian regime even tried to assassinate President Trump, it remains doubtful if this could potentially serve as justification for a U.S. military strike.

When the U.S. struck Iran in June 2025, the administration framed the operations as a preemptive act of self-defense, claiming that Iran had accelerated uranium enrichment at its Fordow nuclear site and was preparing to mount further attacks against U.S. assets in the region through proxy forces. The administration officials also referred to intelligence indicating that missile and drone strikes on U.S. bases in Iraq, Syria, and Jordan were coordinated from Tehran and that additional operations were imminent.

These justifications indicate that the doctrine invoked to justify the strikes was wider than the basic provision of Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides that states have the “inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs.” Since no traditional attack had actually occurred, it was clear that the U.S. was invoking a doctrine based on customary international law, which permits anticipatory self-defense to prevent a clear, manifest, and imminent danger, inasmuch as no other options existed (1897 ‘Caroline’ Criteria).

The complication arises given the fact that the doctrine of anticipatory self-defense, while often cited by Western governments, is not broadly accepted, and in some cases has been criticized² by UN organs, such as the International Court of Justice (ICJ).

The situation becomes more complicated given that the June 2025 strikes were declared by the U.S. to have been highly effective and to have achieved their goals. This being the case, in the absence of a substantial change in circumstances, one would be hard-pressed to allow those justifications to be used again in the current context.

Since then, the only factor that has changed is the demonstrations of the Iranian people and the violent response of the regime. The question that therefore begs is whether international law permits the intervention of a foreign state to protect the human rights of a people subjugated, brutalized, and murdered by its own national regime?

Similar to the broken clock being, albeit inadvertently, accurate twice a day, the UNOHCHR could be seen to be correct in considering that military intervention by a third party, in the absence of an external “attack,” purely based on the response of the regime to the demonstrations, might be a breach of international law.

But this position exposes one of the fundamental failures and limitations of the Laws of Armed Conflict.

The modern-day reality is that only Western democracies see themselves bound by such laws. “Non-state actors,” as terrorist groups are often called, as well as dictatorial and Jihadist regimes capable of massacring their own populations, have little to no regard for the Laws of Armed Conflict, International Humanitarian Law, or any other laws or obligations they may have pursuant to international conventions. Their sole use for the Laws of Armed Conflict is to weaponize them in international forums and in the international media, as a means to delegitimize the actions of law-respecting democracies.

While terrorists and dictators flout every provision of international law and systematically and fundamentally breach human rights, they and their supporters point to the ostensibly solid provisions as means to defend themselves against the actions of the rational, law-abiding actors.

This has certainly been the case as regards Israel and its conflict with the Palestinian terrorists.

The terrorists flout every provision of the laws of war. They intentionally target Israeli civilians and place their terror infrastructure in the heart of civilian populations, with the direct intent to use the civilians as human shields, knowing that any response by Israel will automatically be condemned as violations of humanitarian law. They use schools, kindergartens, mosques, and even hospitals as prime locations from which to operate. They refrain from wearing identifying uniforms and conceal their weapons. They take and hold hostages – all in stark, open, and willful violation of international law.

Yet, when Israel responded to the October 7, 2023, massacre, the worst and most orchestrated massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, fighting with the confines of the Laws of Armed Conflict, the terrorists and their supporters, including multiple branches and organs of the UN, inverted morality, perverted reality, and accused Israel of breaching international law and even, grotesquely, of committing “genocide.”

The actual genocidal terrorists were whitewashed by the international press and UN-washed, while Israel was castigated and singled out for condemnation. Bogus proceedings were initiated in the ICJ. The International Criminal Court (ICC) used a curious and misguided previous decision to invent the non-existent “State of Palestine” and ultra vires ruling to delineate, for the first time ever, the borders of such a non-existent state, to issue arrest warrants against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. To feign even-handedness, the ICC also issued arrest warrants against a number of Hamas terrorists, in full knowledge that they would either be killed or arrested by Israel. As with every other action of the ICC, this act too lacked any element of bona fides.

Accepting the doctrine invoked by the U.S. to justify its June 2025 strike would also implicitly mean accepting that Israel, in 1967, had, at the very least, the same legal justification to carry out a pre-emptive strike when faced with the Arab armies, led by Egypt and Syria, who were preparing themselves to attack and again attempt to annihilate Israel. That conclusion would undermine years of anti-Israel propaganda and delegitimization.

The result is shocking. Ostensibly, the international community, according to the UNOHCHR, is required to completely ignore the human rights of the Iranian people. The ayatollahs and their IRGC henchmen, akin to the Nazis and their willing henchmen, are being given carte blanche to wantonly murder Iranians. All the international community can do, as the highest UN human rights body would have us believe, is to watch as atrocity follows atrocity and to simply “gather evidence.”

The UN Human Rights Council is a shameful disgrace that has never really defended any human rights. The Council was established in 2006 to replace the Human Rights Commission, which everyone agreed was also a colossal failure and had entirely lost any legitimate direction.

Despite the genuinely good intentions of burying the Commission and replacing it with the newly founded Council, in reality, the new body maintained the endemic bias and redundancy of the UN, destined to be used as a mechanism to criticize Western society and democracies, while simultaneously ignoring, and sometimes even supporting, violent dictatorships.

Like it or not, the Iranian regime is doing more than any other entity to undermine international law and to amplify its failings. The Laws of Armed Conflict are, in many cases, a product of state practice. Thus, the more states revert to their inherent right to pre-empt clear and manifest danger, aggression, or attack, the more acceptable the doctrine becomes. If states take it upon themselves to prevent brutal regimes from murdering their populations, that too forms and shapes international law.

True to form, instead of promoting human rights, and acting to defend the rights of people brutally murdered by dictatorial regimes, the UNOHCHR is once again showing its true colors, waving the paper tiger of international law, warning off any intervention on behalf of the Iranian people and again setting the stage to castigate the good guys, while defending the axis of evil.

Every time Iran and the terrorists, with the support and facilitation of the UN, distort reality, pervert international law, and flout human rights, they are contributing to the strengthening of long-held doctrines that clarify how good can truly triumph over evil.

Luckily for all, especially the Iranian people, it would seem that the moral compass of President Trump and his administration is unlikely to be deterred by the supporters of terror and the defenders of tyranny in the UN and the international community, waving failed policies to protect the ayatollahs as they butcher the Iranians.

Moving forward, the legal community must examine how the Laws of Armed Conflict have been weaponized by those who completely ignore them, as a means to attack law-abiding nations and as an excuse to prevent or delegitimize intervention, as jihadists wantonly murder innocent people.

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Notes