The U.N. Security Council scheduled an emergency meeting about Iran on Friday afternoon, after the United States asked the world body to show support for Iran's anti-government protesters.
Alma Konurbayeva, a spokeswoman for current Security Council president Kazakhstan, confirmed that the council would meet to discuss Iran. But with council members divided in their views of the demonstrations that have roiled the Islamic republic, neither the shape of the discussion nor what might come out of it were clear.
"This is a matter of fundamental human rights for the Iranian people, but it is also a matter of international peace and security," U.S. envoy Nikki Haley said in a statement Thursday night. She added that it would be "telling if any country tries to deny the Security Council from even having this discussion."
However, not all council members see a need to weigh in.
Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkovhas called the U.S. move "harmful and destructive," RIA news agency reported on Thursday.
"We see no role for the United Nations Security Council in this issue," he said, according to the agency.
Commenting on the possibility of new U.S. sanctions on Iran, Ryabkov said such methods were "illegitimate."
Iranian Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said up to 42,000 people had taken part in the week of protests and unrest, which were sparked by economic woes. At least 21 people have been killed and hundreds have been arrested. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of people took part in counter-demonstrations Wednesday backing the clerically overseen government, which has accused the U.S. of instigating the protests.
Iran's prosecutor general, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, said Thursday that an American CIA official was the "main designer" of the demonstrations, and Iranian Ambassador to the U.N. Gholamali Khoshroo complained in a letter to the Security Council president Wednesday that U.S. President Donald Trump's "absurd tweets" had "incited Iranians to engage in disruptive acts."
Trump's administration has denied having any hand in the demonstrations, saying they arose completely spontaneously. The CIA declined to comment.
U.S. senators and administration officials met at the White House on Thursday, hoping to hammer out compromise legislation to tighten restrictions on Iran while keeping Washington in the 2015 international nuclear deal with Tehran. The deal limits Iran's nuclear program in exchange for loosening sanctions on the country.
Sen. Bob Corker, the Republican chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Sen. Ben Cardin, the panel's top Democrat, had an evening meeting with Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, to discuss possible legislation, Senate and White House aides said.
The stakes have risen in the past week with the anti-government protests across Iran, the boldest challenge to Iran's leadership in a decade.
Trump has worried European allies by railing against the nuclear deal, which was reached under his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama. In October, the Republican president announced that he would not certify that staying in the pact was in the U.S. national security interest and threatened to pull out if lawmakers did not act to toughen it.
Members of Congress have been working since then to come up with a bipartisan compromise that would give Trump enough political cover not to reimpose sanctions on Iranian oil before a deadline next week, an action that would kill the pact.
Aides said they were looking at measures including ending the requirement that Trump re-certify the agreement every 90 days and changing some of the so-called sunset provisions to allow the reimposition of U.S. sanctions, with no timetable, if Iran's nuclear program reaches certain thresholds.
Corker said the protests in Iran were making it more important that Washington not do anything to shift the focus from Iran's government.
"The last thing we need to do from my perspective would be to turn that attention to us," he said.
Separately, the U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday sanctioned five Iranian-based entities it said were owned or controlled by an industrial firm responsible for developing and producing Iran's solid-propellant ballistic missiles. While those sanctions were unrelated to the ongoing protests, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said more sanctions "targeting human rights abuses are coming."
The department said the sanctioned entities – the Shahid Eslami Research Center, Shahid Kharrazi Industries, Shahid Moghaddam Industries, Shahid Sanikhani Industries and Shahid Shustari Industries – were subordinated to the Shahid Bakeri Industrial Group.
The sanctions freeze any property the entities hold in the United States and prohibit Americans from dealing with them.
