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Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, said Sunday the rights council “be ashamed to allow Mr. Avaei to address its membership.” Haley used the chance to again criticize alleged shortcomings of the council that she had laid out in speeches in Geneva in June.

“Yet again the council discredits itself by allowing serial human rights abusers to highjack its work and make a mockery of its mandate to promote universal human rights,” Haley said. “This does nothing but reinforce the United States’ call for much needed reforms at the council for it to be viewed as a good investment of our time and money.”

Council spokesman Rolando Gomez said nations can choose who they want to represent them at the 47-member body.

The U.S. delegation to the council doubled down on Tuesday, saying he “oversaw the summary executions of Iranians” in the late 1980s. Today, it said, he oversees arbitrary arrests and imprisonment “in a network of facilities notorious for suspicious deaths, the use of torture, and denial of medical care.”

The National Council of Resistance of Iran, a leading group of exile and expatriate opponents of Iran’s Islamic government, staged a noisy and well-orchestrated protest — if small, at about 100 people — outside the gates of the U.N. building shortly before Avaei addressed the council.

Protester Nasser Razi, a member of the NCRI’s foreign affairs committee, said Avaei was involved in the execution of thousands of prisoners at the end of Iran’s war with Iraq in 1988. International rights groups estimate that as many as 5,000 people were executed, while the NCRI puts the number at more than 30,000.