About

The Iran Rights Index

The Iran Rights Index (IRIx) is a flexible web platform that catalogues and assesses compliance with recommendations made by various United Nations human rights mechanisms to the Islamic Republic of Iran. At launch, the Index covers recommendations made by three

UN Treaty Bodies
  • Human Rights Committee
  • Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
  • Committee on the Rights of the Child
and six
UN Special Procedures
  • Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions
  • Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders
  • Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran
  • Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences
  • Special Rapporteur on freedom of religion or belief
  • Working Group on Arbitrary Detention
in the period 1993 - 2020.

Iran has received hundreds of recommendations from UN human rights mechanisms over the past three decades. Though not legally binding themselves, such recommendations carry obligation, insofar as they reflect Iran's compliance (or lack thereof) with international human rights standards to which the Government is legally bound. To date, there has been no evidenced-based mechanism for systematically following up on Iran’s progress in implementing these recommendations.

Whether it’s the adoption of a new law or the moratorium on a harmful practice, the ability to regularly monitor and evaluate the real-world impact of steps taken by the Government to address human rights concerns is key to ensuring accountability. But most UN accountability mechanisms can only review the country’s human rights record intermittently, sometimes not following up for five or more years at a time. Iran can delay its review by some mechanisms indefinitely by simply choosing not to engage.

The IRIx aims to close this follow-up gap by providing consistent, thorough and up-to-date legal analysis of Iran’s compliance with the full scope of recommendations it has received from UN rights mechanisms. IRIx legal assessments were undertaken using an analytical methodology based on human rights indicators, which are freely available for download.


To help put the content of the IRIx into context, United for Iran, a human rights organization and coalition member, has developed the suite of visualizations below in collaboration with Impact Iran, as part of U4I's Human Rights Barometer project. A Persian version of the document is also available here.