Who is Mai Sato, the new UN Special Rapporteur on Iran succeeding Javaid Rehman?

On the last day of its fifty-sixth session, the UN Human Rights Council appointed Mai Sato, a Japanese lawyer, as the new UN Special Rapporteur on Iran. The council announced on Friday, July 13, that Ms. Sato will succeed Javaid Rehman in this position. The role of the Special Rapporteur is to investigate the human rights situation in Iran and, in this regard, she will seek to travel to Iran and report her findings to the UN Human Rights Council. Javaid Rehman, a Pakistani-British lawyer, had held this position since July 2018. In 2011, the Islamic Republic of Iran stated that it would cooperate with a UN Special Rapporteur only if the rapporteur was "male," "Muslim," and "not from Arab countries." However, the Iranian government has not allowed any Special Rapporteurs, including Javaid Rehman during his six-year mission, to travel to Iran and has repeatedly accused him of "politicking" and "lack of neutrality." Javaid Rehman expressed concern about broader human rights issues in Iran, highlighting the high number of arrests, executions, and unlawful killings in the Islamic Republic, and referred to the massacre of political prisoners in the 1980s as "atrocities against humanity and genocide." But who is Mai Sato? Born in Tokyo and holding a PhD in law from the UK, she has collaborated with the Australian National University (ANU) for the past five years, focusing on issues such as "capital punishment," "judicial misconduct," and "international human rights law." Ms. Sato is currently a member of the College of Asia and the Pacific at ANU and teaches master's courses in criminology, justice, and regulation. Previously based in the UK, she has worked with the University of Reading's law school, the University of Oxford's criminology center, and the UK Criminal Policy Research Institute. Ms. Sato has studied capital punishment in countries such as Japan, Malaysia, India, and Zimbabwe, and is a co-founder of the non-profit CrimeInfo in Japan, which informs on capital punishment and criminal justice issues. Roya Boroumand, a human rights activist and co-founder of the Boroumand Foundation, remarked on social media that Ms. Sato's expertise in the area of executions is "good news for a country with an unusually high rate of capital punishment." She further noted that this lawyer's expertise is "very much needed" to monitor the human rights situation in Iran. The Iranian government records the highest number of executions relative to its population in the world, and violations of women's rights by the Islamic Republic have led to one of the largest nationwide protests last year in Iran. Over the past decades, the Islamic Republic has not allowed UN human rights rapporteurs to enter Iran and report. The last time a UN human rights rapporteur visited Iran was in the 1990s, before the UN Human Rights Commission was transformed into the Human Rights Council. Maurice Copithorne served as the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran from 1995 to 2001 and visited Iran during his mission. In 2011, he told Radio Farda, "In this position, I had to wait for an invitation from the Iranian government to travel to Iran. After my first report was published, the leaders of the Islamic Republic were so angry that they no longer allowed me to travel." Before Copithorne, Reynaldo Galindo Pohl was able to visit Iran while serving as the Special Rapporteur from 1986 to 1994, although some human rights activists believe he did not take full advantage of the opportunity. Prior to him, Andres Aguilar was the first human rights rapporteur to visit Iran, but he also faced significant obstacles from the Iranian government. After about a decade without a UN Special Rapporteur to investigate the human rights situation in Iran, the UN Human Rights Council appointed Ahmed Shaheed, a former Maldives foreign minister, as the Special Rapporteur on human rights in Iran in June 2011, and his mandate was later extended. Iranian officials opposed Mr. Shaheed's visit to Iran and made various accusations against him throughout his tenure. Why have visits by human rights officials to Iran not been routine? The severe government crackdown and the risk of protests going "underground".