United Nations, New York – Iran has been elected vice-chair of the United Nations Charter Committee, a body tasked with examining and strengthening the principles of the U.N. Charter, drawing criticism from Israel and renewed scrutiny of the organization’s selection processes.

The appointment was approved during the committee’s opening meeting as part of its executive composition, through an agreed procedure and without a formal vote.

At a U.N. press briefing, Fox News Digital asked whether Iran’s record aligns with the values of the Charter and whether the secretary-general would condemn the move.

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“The election of any member state to a body is the result of voting by member states themselves,” Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the secretary-general said. “So, questions about who gets elected to which bodies is a question for member states. We expect every member state of this organization to uphold the Charter, to uphold the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, given that they themselves signed on to this club that the U.N. is and those are founding, some of our founding documents.”

Pressed on whether the secretary-general would condemn Iran’s election, the spokesperson added, “It is not for him to condemn the election of any member state to a body. He will condemn and has when member states, through their actions, he feels, violate the charter or human rights.”

The Charter Committee operates under the U.N. Legal Committee and meets annually. Its mandate includes examining issues related to the Charter and proposing ways to reinforce its implementation, though its work typically requires consensus among member states and rarely results in binding action.

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Anne Bayefsky, president of Human Rights Voices and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, sharply criticized the move, linking it to longstanding concerns about the U.N.’s performance.

“The U.N. created a committee back in 1974 supposedly to ‘enhance the ability of the U.N. to achieve its purposes.’ The trouble is that, ever since, the U.N. has been a downward trajectory on actually achieving its primary purposes, namely, maintaining international peace and security and promoting respect for fundamental human rights,” Bayefsky said.

“Given that Iran is the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism and a country committed to the annihilation of the Jewish state and the bloody repression of its own people, the U.N. appointment helps clarify that in our time, U.N. purposes are in fact antithetical to peace, rights and human dignity.”

Israel’s Ambassador to the U.N. Danny Danon sharply criticized Iran’s appointment. 

“This is a moral absurdity,” Danon said. “A regime that violates the basic principles of the U.N. cannot represent them.

“A country that systematically violates the basic principles of the U.N. cannot sit in a leadership position that deals with strengthening them. The U.N. cannot continue to grant legitimacy to regimes that violate the very principles of its own charter.”

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The committee has in recent years served as a forum for political disputes among member states, including criticism directed at Israel, diplomats say. Iran’s selection to a leadership role comes amid ongoing debate over how the U.N. balances representation among member states with concerns about human rights records and adherence to the organization’s founding principles.

The U.N. maintains that leadership positions across its committees are determined by member states, not the secretariat, and reflect internal diplomatic processes rather than endorsement of any government’s policies or record.

Bell Labs, the once-famed research arm of AT&T, celebrated the centennial of its founding last year.

In its heyday, starting in the 1940s, the lab created a cascade of inventions, including the transistor, information theory and an enduring computer software language. The labs’ digital DNA is in our smartphones, social media and chatbot conversations.

“Every hour of your day has a bit of Bell Labs in it,” observed Jon Gertner, author of “The Idea Factory,” a history of the storied research center.

Bell Labs’ most far-reaching idea — information theory — forms the bedrock of computing. The mathematical framework, known as the “Magna Carta of the information age,” provided a blueprint for sending and receiving information with precision and reliability. It was the brainchild of Claude Shannon, a brilliant eccentric whom the A.I. start-up Anthropic named its chatbot after.

Last month, Nvidia announced a new A.I. chip packed with more than 300 billion transistors — the tiny on-off electrical switches invented in the lab.

Bell Labs became so powerful and renowned that it is entrenched in pop culture. The 1968 sci-fi movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” drew inspiration from Bell Labs, and the father of the titular character in the period dramedy “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” worked there. Most recently, characters in the show “Severance” report to a former Bell Labs building.

Here are some of the labs’ most prominent inventions.