Louise Arbour spoke in Tehran at 2007 Non-Aligned meeting
louise arbour went to Tehran in 2007 to speak at a high-level Non-Aligned Movement meeting on human rights and cultural diversity. She was then the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and was scheduled as one of the keynote speakers while sharing a stage with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
The trip carried a professional risk, John Mundy wrote, because Arbour had been accused of being anti-Israeli. Mundy, Canada’s last ambassador to Iran before he was expelled in 2007, said she had the standing to do it.
Tehran meeting
Arbour represented the UN at a gathering Iran used to bring in more than 50 foreign ministers and roughly 100 official delegations. The meeting theme was human rights and cultural diversity, and her appearance placed a senior UN human-rights official in the same forum as Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president in 2007.
Mundy described the setting in direct terms: “Louise Arbour is no stranger to difficult assignments.” He added: “She was taking a professional risk by coming to Iran, but she had the international stature to carry it off.”
Arbour’s record
By the time she reached Tehran, Arbour had already built a reputation through war-crimes prosecutions. The UN Security Council appointed her as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda in the late 1990s, and she pursued Jean Kambanda, the former prime minister of Rwanda.
Kambanda became the first person to plead guilty to the crime of genocide in 1998. Arbour later indicted Slobodan Milošević for crimes against humanity in 1999, and Jean Chrétien appointed her to the Supreme Court of Canada later that year.
Canada and Iran
Arbour resigned from the Supreme Court of Canada in 2004 to become the UN high commissioner for human rights. In that role, she warned Israel about potential human rights abuses during the 2006 Lebanon War, and the Iranian government had not taken her criticism calmly.
That backdrop made her Tehran appearance more than a ceremonial stop. It put a UN rights chief who had challenged governments in court and in public criticism directly in front of a leadership that had already bristled at her positions.
