Washington will not send any officials to a U.N. event celebrating the memory of Iranian president Ebrahim Raisi on Thursday, National Review has learned.
It won’t be the first time that the international organization has expressed its condolences for Raisi. The U.N. put its flags at half-staff after Raisi died in a helicopter crash alongside foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other officials on May 19. U.N. secretary general Antonio Guterres and his deputy, Amina Mohammed, signed a condolence book for Raisi last week.
A U.S. official cited Raisi’s involvement in abuses that human-rights groups have said should be investigated as crimes against humanity as the reason for the boycott, the news of which Reuters reported first.
“The United Nations should be standing with the people of Iran, not memorializing their decades-long oppressor,” the U.S. official told NR in a statement.
“Raisi was involved in numerous, horrific human-rights abuses, including the extrajudicial killings of thousands of political prisoners in 1988. Some of the worst human-rights abuses on record, especially against the women and girls of Iran, took place during his tenure,” the official said.
Up to this point, the Biden administration had publicly tolerated the U.N.’s expressions of grief for Raisi. Secretary of State Antony Blinken declined to condemn the U.N. decision to lower its flags, when pressed repeatedly on the subject by Senator Ted Cruz at a hearing this month. The State Department issued a press release offering its “official condolences” for Raisi’s death on May 20.