TEHRAN – Iran’s ambassador to Brazil has said expulsion of Iran from the United Nations Commission on Status of Women (CSW) under pressure from the U.S. and its allies is “a kind of bullying”.

Principally not country or group of countries have the right to limit the participation of a United Nations member state in bodies linked to the UN, Hossein Gharibi told ISNA in an interview published on Tuesday.

Actually, the right of participation in international bodies is a “sovereign right” and other countries cannot limit it, Gharibi added.

On December 19, a number of UN member states under pressure from the United States voted to oust Iran from the CSW. Iran was in the midst of a four-year elected term on the CSW.

Twenty-nine member states voted in favor of the action, eight voted against it, and at least sixteen member states abstained.

The U.S. pushed for the removal of Iran from the commission under the allegation that Iran has cracked down on women following the riots that erupted following the death of Mahsa Amini at police custody.

The CSW is intergovernmental body tasked with protecting women’s rights and promoting gender equality.

Ambassador Gharibi said it is “quite clear” that the U.S. put “great pressure” on other countries to vote for the removal of Iran in order to advance its “political purposes”.

The ambassador went on to say that there is “no doubt” that the Iranian women and girls have made “great progresses” in the recent decades.

Examples of the promotion of the status of women in Iran is the number of women studying at universities coupled their social activities, he stated.

According to statistics by the Ministry of Science, women accounted for 47.6 percent of students and men 52.4 percent in the academic year 2018-2019.

The ambassador said now the question is whether depriving Iran from for exchange of views and experiences at the commission will help promote the status of women or it is just a media campaign for “political exploitation” by the United States.

Gharibi said the United States drafted the resolution to expel Iran from the UN commission while the U.S. itself is the “greatest violator” of the obligations under the UN charter.

He cited a concrete example, saying, “Security Council Resolution 2231, which was one of the main achievements of the United Nations in recent years, has been completely violated by the U.S. which is a permanent member of the Security Council.”

Even Biden administration has not done anything to compensate “this open violation” of the Security Council resolution, he lamented.

Former U.S. President Donald Trump abrogated the 2015 Iran nuclear deal– JCPOA- in 2018 under his “maximum pressure” campaign against the Islamic Republic. By quitting the JCPAO the U.S. actually violated Resolution 2231 that endorsed the multilateral agreement.

The Iranian ambassador to Brazil said if another country had openly violated such a resolution “it would have surely faced serious consequences”.

That the United States, with such a bad record, leads the campaign to limit Iran’s activities at the UN is “really ridiculous”, the diplomat remarked.

He added a look at the position of the countries, even the Europeans, that voted for removing Iran from the UN commission shows that all of them hold the U.S. responsible for the current economic situation in Iran as Washington violated Resolution 2231 and imposed illegal sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Now regrettably certain European countries are using the unrest in Iran in “their own favor” and “hypocritically” cooperate with the United States instead of blaming Washington for economic woes in Iran.

“It was good if the countries that now backed the U.S. move (in removing Iran from CSW) pay a look at the roots of the current situation.”

Since the protests erupted in Iran in mid-September, Western countries - the U.S., Canada, European Union countries - have introduced a new series of sanctions against Iran. Australia has also joined the West in imposing sanctions on Iran.

These sanctions are in addition to the “maximum pressure” campaign that the Trump administration launched against Iran in 2018.

“Moves that in addition to the maximum pressure against the Iranian people have been intensified are by no means justified. Therefore, this move by the (UN) Economic and Social Council actually lacks any content,” the ambassador remarked.