West seeking to declare itself unchallenged source of legitimacy in world — Lavrov
Lavrov said that advocating these views the West is tending to ignore international law and obsessively speculates on the so-called rule-based order
UNITED NATIONS, September 27. /TASS/. Western nations are seeking to hamper the process of building a polycentric world and to declare themselves an unchallenged source of legitimacy, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said on Friday at the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly.
"Leading Western nations are seeking to hamper the process of formation of a polycentric world, to regain their privileged positions, to impose on others their standards of conduct that are based on a narrow Western interpretation of liberalism. To put it in a nutshell: ‘We are liberals, we can do whatever we want,’" he said, adding that advocating these views the West is tending to ignore international law and obsessively speculates on the so-called rule-based order.
"The concept of such ‘order’ is obviously geared to review the norms of international law the West no longer needs and replace them with the ‘rules’ adjusted to fit its own selfish schemes that are worded depending on the political expediency and to declare the West and only the West as an unchallenged source of legitimacy," Lavrov noted. "For instance, the right of nations to self-determination matters only when it is to its advantage and when it is not, it is declared ‘illegitimate.’"
According to the Russian top diplomat, in order to back its revisionist rules the West manipulates public conscience, propagates false information, uses double standards in the human rights sphere, exerts pressure on dissent media and hampers journalists’ activities.
Instead of equal collective work, closed formats beyond legitimate multilateral frameworks are established and approaches agreed in camera among the chosen ones are declared as ‘multilateral agreements.’ "All this is accompanies by attempts to ‘privatize’ secretariats of international organizations, to use them to push through non-consensus ideas in bypassing of universal mechanisms," he stressed.