Iran joins UN women’s rights panel

"The vote happened so long ago that everyone just forgets that the changing of the guard is happening now," said Anne Bayefsky, a Canadian political science professor who heads the monitoring group Eye on the UN.

"Iran's presence will be a real affront to women, but it will also show how the UN is back to business-as-usual despite the great fanfare this week surrounding the action it took on Libya," she said, directing her criticism at UN General Assembly President Joseph Deiss of Switzerland, who said he was "proud" to have chaired the session in which Libya was suspended from the human rights body.

Bayefsky's group points to numerous other examples of what it describes as misplaced UN "authority figures", including Cuba and Belarus which sit on the UN Commission on Sustainable Development; Somalia and Sudan which are members of the executive committee of the UN's refugee agency; and Iran, Kazakhstan and China which sit alongside Libya on the UN Committee on Information.

"The UN has no intention of really cleaning house," she concluded.