UNITED NATIONS, February 3. /TASS/. During a meeting with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, Russia's Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya expressed serious concern over his statements indicating a selective interpretation of the UN Charter on the issue of Crimea and Donbas.
Last week, Guterres, responding to a TASS question, stated that the UN Secretariat had concluded that the right of peoples to self-determination was inapplicable in the situations of Crimea and Donbass. According to him, the UN Secretariat believes that in these situations, "the principle of territorial integrity prevails" over the right of peoples to self-determination. Meanwhile, his spokesperson said earlier that the United Nations respects Greenland’s right to self-determination.
"The Russian side expressed serious concern over the secretary general’s recent statements containing a selective interpretation of the UN Charter in what concerns the principles of peoples’ self-determination and territorial integrity of states," the Russian mission said.
According to the mission, the Russian side stressed that neither the secretary general nor the UN Secretariat "have any right to interpret the principles and norm of international law." "Such a selective attitude to the UN Charter provisions by the employees of the world organization’s Secretariat is, in fact, a denial of the right of some peoples to self-determination and, at the same time, a recognition of its universal nature in other cases, which is absolutely unacceptable," the mission stressed.