MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. Russia’s Council for Human Rights can become an effective international venue for protecting human rights, Russian President Vladimir Putin said at a meeting with members of the Council for Civil Society and Human Rights on Wednesday.
"I think that our council as an institution working with a wide circle of civic organizations in Russia and abroad can become an effective international venue where the issues of human rights and their protection in the modern world can be discussed," Putin said.
The Russian leader noted that work by the council members on defending the rights and the truth of Russian people and those living in Donbass, their cultural heritage and traditional values has enormous significance. He stressed the importance of human rights activists continuing to expose the crimes by the Nazi regime established in Ukraine. "Since the rights of the residents of the long-suffering Donbass have been completely ignored by the global community - the so-called global community - for eight years, as we have been repeatedly stressing. At the same time, our council has repeatedly addressed this subject, sent information to relevant international institutions designed to ensure and support human rights, promote human rights but they - many of them, in any case, the majority of those who are now acting as accusers, - pretended that they went blind or deaf all at once," the Russian president asserted.
Putin particularly emphasized that the people of Donbass were noticed only following the onset of the special military operation. "The UN Human Rights Council, the Council of Europe, other so-called human rights organizations have suddenly ‘seen the light’ and shamelessly began to display their cynical bias, I would say, playing the blame game, as we say. All of this meant that these structures are incapable of fulfilling their statutory goals," he added, stressing that Russia had to renounce its membership in some of these organizations due to their obvious bias.