Iran will be the chair of a United Nations conference on nuclear disarmament in Geneva later this month.
The Conference on Disarmament will be attended by 65 countries and is the world’s most important forum to discuss disarmament.
The spokesperson to the US mission in Geneva, Erin Pelton, has said that his country will not be represented at the conference.
Pelton said that having Iran as president of the conference “runs counter to the goals and objectives of the Conference on Disarmament itself.”
“As a result, the United States will not be represented at the ambassadorial level during any meeting presided over by Iran,” she said.
Hillel Neuer, of UN Watch, an NGO that monitors the work of the United Nations, said it would protest outside the conference.
“Iran is an international outlaw state that illegally supplies rockets to Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas, aiding and abetting mass murder and terrorism. To make this rogue regime head of world arms control is simply an outrage.”
“We urge world leaders to declare that allowing Iran to chair a U.N. disarmament body is simply unacceptable, given the fundamentalist regime’s illicit activities in precisely the opposite direction,” Neuer said in a statement.
