MINSK, February 24. /TASS/. The activities of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) are increasingly turning into a farce, said Belarusian Deputy Foreign Minister Igor Sekreta at the high-level segment of the HRC 61st session.
"Today's speeches prove that the work of the Human Rights Council is becoming more and more a failure, turning into a farce," the Foreign Ministry quoted him as saying. According to Sekreta, most states are increasingly unsatisfied with this UN body. Only those who are trying to impose their own recipe for "democracy" through it are happy, which in fact turns into chaos and unconstitutional disorder for other countries, he said.
"The resolutions adopted in this hall, alas, are not at all about human rights. They serve completely different purposes - justifying sanctions, external pressure, lynching ‘inconvenient states,’ dividing the world into ‘the bad’ and ‘the good.’ Special rapporteurs and so-called independent experts have assumed the role of quasi-judicial bodies: they directly interfere in the internal affairs of sovereign states. Question: on what basis? For some reason, some countries are viewed under a magnifying glass, while others find themselves in the council's blind spot. But there are no ideal countries, as the results of the universal periodic review show. Everyone must obey the same laws," the diplomat said.
According to him, today a global reform has been imposed on the states again accompanied by reductions, optimizations, and liquidation in the hope that it will help restore efficiency, including in the Human Rights Council.
"But reform also costs money! And, as a rule, the most important areas suffer in the pursuit of optimization - development issues, social projects, support for the vulnerable segments of the population (children, elderly people, people with disabilities). But the truth is also that no amount of institutional transformation, reduction, and optimization will yield results unless the main, systemic problem is solved. And this problem lies not in the formal structure or status of the council, but in how, I emphasize, it is how the states use this body and what agenda they carry there," Sekreta said.
He said that as long as the countries introduce their bilateral differences and geopolitical disputes into the international human rights agenda hiding behind this human rights agenda, the HRC undermines the principles of impartiality and cooperation and nothing will change. According to Sekreta, the HRC needs not cosmetic changes, but the return of all countries to the basic principles.
"Let me remind you: this is a return to respect for the sovereign equality of states, the rejection of interference in the internal affairs and the use of human rights as a tool of pressure. Only under this condition will the council be able to maintain its legitimacy in the international system for the protection and promotion of human rights," he added.