Outcry over China, Saudi and Russia on UN Human Rights Council

CHINA, Russia and Saudi Arabia are expected to be elected to the UN Human Rights Council today, a move critics have likened to letting “a gang of arsonists into the fire brigade”.

The countries, along with Cuba, Pakistan and Uzbekistan, are vying for 15 board seats on the 47-nation council and are thought to have enough support to win the vote. Critics yesterday said electing the world’s worst rights violators would be a blow to the council’s already weakened integrity.

Human Rights Watch called on member states including Britain and the EU, not to vote for China and Saudi Arabia, which are among the regimes most frequently accused of human rights abuses. The NGO based in New York added that Russia’s numerous war crimes in Syria made it another highly problematic candidate.

Cuba and Russia have no competition in their regional blocs, which vote in a secret ballot today, making their election a virtual certainty.

The Asian regional group is the only one being contested, with five candidates vying for four available seats. But because China, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia are so powerful at the UN it is almost certain they, too, will be elected.

Hillel Neuer, the executive director of UN Watch, a Geneva-based monitoring NGO, said: “It’s logically absurd and morally obscene that the UN is about to elect to its top human rights body a regime that herded one million Uighurs into camps, arrested [and] crushed ... those who tried to sound the alarm about the coronavirus, and suffocated freedom in Hong Kong.” He added: “Saudi Arabia carried out a record 184 executions in 2019. Russia assassinates journalists and poisons dissidents. Cuba is a police state.”

Vladimir Kara-murza, a Russian opposition activist, said: “We find it astonishing that the regime of Vladimir Putin is even allowed to stand, let alone that it looks likely to win.”