Don’t pay attention to the hypocritical U.N resolution that Venezuela, Cuba brag is a victory
It’s absolutely ridiculous! The 47-member U.N. Human Rights Council has just passed a resolution that essentially condemns international efforts to press Venezuela, Cuba and other dictatorships to respect human rights.
Yes, you read right. On March 23, the Council, based in Geneva, Switzerland, condemned “the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures on the enjoyment of human rights.” In U.N. lingo, “coercive measures” refers to sanctions.
The resolution further calls on countries “to avoid the use of economic, political or other measures to coerce another state with regard to the exercise of its sovereign rights.” In other words, it asks the world community to look the other way when a dictatorship massacres its people, in contradiction with the U.N.’s own human-rights charter.
The resolution was supported by, among others, Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, Argentina and Uruguay. It was opposed by Great Britain, Denmark and France. The United States did not vote because — despite the Biden administration’s announcement that it will rejoin the Council — it’s not yet a member. Mexico abstained.
Predictably, Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was one of the first to celebrate the Council’s vote. The U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Venezuela recently accused his regime of crimes against humanity, including forced disappearances and torture. Earlier, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human
Rights issued a report documenting at least 6,856 suspicious deaths and extrajudicial executions by Maduro’s security forces between January 2018 and May 2019.
Hours after the Council’s resolution, Cuba’s foreign minister Bruno Rodriguez applauded the vote, and Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza tweeted that for “basic ethical reasons, the countries that voted against (the resolution) should lose their seats at the Council.”
Human-rights advocates are shaking their heads in disbelief.
“So now they are trying to convince us that Maduro is a victim of humanrights abuses,” Hillel Neuer, head of the Geneva-based U.N. Watch human rights group told me. “This is completely upside down.”
Neuer added that the Council’s vote is part of a new narrative being used by dictatorships to whitewash their crimes and portray themselves as victims.
It’s a narrative that has been facilitated by Alena Douhan, the U.N.
Special Rapporteur on Negative Impact of the Unilateral Coercive Measures on the Enjoyment of Human Rights — sorry, that’s her full title — an academic of Belarus. Humanrights advocates describe her as a Maduro propagandist.
Last month, Douhan visited Venezuela at the invitation of the Maduro regime, becoming one of the very few U.N. human rights investigators to be allowed into the country. Maduro had previously rejected petitions to visit the country from the U.N. special investigators on torture, freedom of speech, arbitrary detentions and summary executions.
After her visit, Douhan wrote a report that harshly condemned international sanctions against Venezuela, asking the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union to lift their “devastating” economic sanctions against the Maduro regime.
Problem is, Venezuela’s humanitarian crisis was caused by Maduro, long before U.S. and European Union sanctions. Most sanctions are targeted visa and banking measures against specific Venezuelan regime officials, and have no impact on average Venezuelans. And U.S. financial measures, such as a ban on dealings in new stocks and bonds issued by the Venezuelan regime, started in 2017, with a provision that they should not hurt average Venezuelans.
By then, Venezuela already was the world’s biggest economic disaster, and millions of Venezuelans had fled the country.
Human Rights Watch, the Washington D.C.-based advocacy group, says it generally opposes broad unilateral sanctions that hurt populations, but that Venezuela’s case does not fully fall into that category.
“Human Rights Watch’s research proves that the collapse of Venezuela’s economy predates the economic sanctions, and imports of food and medicines decreased prior to their imposition,” José Miguel Vivanco, head of Human Rights Watch Americas told me in an e-mail. “And there is absolutely no guarantee that the corrupt and abusive Maduro regime would have used oil revenue to provide humanitarian assistance to the Venezuelan people.”
He added that international sanctions, particularly those targeting officials, “can be an effective diplomatic tool to press human-rights violators to curb their abuses.”
In Venezuela’s case, I would add, international sanctions are more than that. They are the only realistic way to bring down the bloodiest dictatorship in Latin America’s recent history. Instead of heeding the U.N. Council’s absurd vote, world democracies should dramatically increase their measures against Venezuela’s ruling mafia.