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Lavrov slams West’s attempts to usurp global decision-making as harmful

Faced with the inability to impose their unilateral or bloc priorities on other countries within the United Nations, Western leading nations are seeking to reverse the process of building a polycentric world, Russia's top diplomat said

MOSCOW, May 7. /TASS/. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has slammed as harmful the West’s attempts to usurp the process of global decision-making.

Faced with the inability to impose their unilateral or bloc priorities on other countries within the United Nations, Western leading nations are seeking to reverse the process of building a polycentric world and stop the march of history, he said during an online United Nations meeting.

"To these ends, they are promoting the concept of the so-called rule-based order that is designed to replace international law. It would be appropriate to recall that international law is actually a code of rules, which were agreed within universal formats on the basis of consensus or a broad consent," he explained.

"Instead, the West is seeking to put their rules, worked out in closed, non-inclusive formats and imposed on all the rest up against joint collective efforts of the entire world community," Lavrov said. "We think such actions that are geared to usurp the process of decision-making in bypassing of the United Nations and offered for global use as harmful."

According to Russia’s top diplomat, the US administration’s idea of a summit of democracies to be held this year is likewise harmful. "The establishment of one more interest club on an openly idealized basis may only escalate international tension, and deepen division lines in the world, which needs a unifying agenda more than ever before. Notably, the list of democracies to be invited to this summit will be drawn by the United States itself," he added.

The minister drew attention to another "initiative claiming global leadership" that is being promoted bypassing the United Nations - the French-German idea of an alliance for multilateralism. "It is only natural to tackle matters of multilateralism within the United Nations. But Berlin and Paris think the other way. They issue a joint document claiming that the European Union is a cornerstone of the multilateral system. They back a Council of Europe document assigning the central role in promoting multilateralism to the European Union. You’d say it is arrogant. But the European Union doesn’t think so and declares its exclusiveness in spite of all of its mantras about equality and brotherhood," he said.