UNITED NATIONS, July 3 (Itar-Tass) — Moscow is still unable to clear out the situation around the Russian citizens arrested and sentenced to jail terms in Libya, First Deputy Ambassador to the United Nations, Alexander Pankin told reporters here Tuesday.
He said it Monday upon the end of consultations on the situation in Libya, which the UN Security Council held behind closed doors. Members of the Council invited the UN Human Rights Commissioner, Navi Pillay, to make a report on the situation that has taken shape in Libya.
Pankin said Russia had failed to get answers to the questions it finds particularly alarming.
“There’s no clarity as regards the plight of our compatriots,” he said as he expressed dissatisfaction over the fact the appropriate UN agencies are not engaged in the investigations of arrests and trials of this kind that have turned into a rife feature of Libya’s contemporary reality.
At the beginning of June, a Libyan court charged a group of Belarusian, Russian and Ukranian citizens with being accomplices to the Gaddafi regime and sentenced them to protracted jail terms.
In part, one of the Russians, a certain Akexander Shadrov, was sentenced for life and one more Russian, Vladimir Dolgov, to ten years.
Pankin made it clear that the real situation in Libya stands in a marked contrast to what a number of Western countries think of it in a belief that the Libyan authorities are cooperating actively with the international community.
“It turns out there’s no access to whole territories that are closed off,” he said. “They introduce new laws that apparently discriminate against certain groups of the population, including black labor migrants.”
“There are no signs in Libya of the UN structures playing any important role in terms of the observance of human rights,” Pankin said. “There’s a bustle of activity but to no avail. There no statistics on the numbers of detainees at all but there’s a mass of rumors on torture and out-of-court executions.”
“It’s not the government in Libya that controls jails, it’s the local councils and “Brands” that do and that’s why there’s absolutely no clear picture that our delegation – and other delegations, too – would like to get,” Pankin said.