The UN Human Rights Council opens its session
The Russian invasion of Ukraine will be the focus of the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) session, which opens on Monday and culminates in the release of an inquiry into war crimes being carried out in the country.
Iran, Ethiopia, Syria, Haiti, Nicaragua… many situations of human rights violations will enliven the debates for almost six weeks in Geneva against a background of high international tensions.
Nearly 150 senior leaders, including the heads of French, American, Chinese, Iranian and Ukrainian diplomats, will speak Monday through Thursday, a record.
Moscow is expected to send its Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov on Thursday. Despite calls from NGOs, it is not certain that the diplomats will leave the room at the time of his speech, as they did for his video-intervened leader Sergei Lavrov last year.
“We can expect pretty strong speeches, some divergences,” warned Swiss Ambassador Jürg Lauber.
United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk will set the tone on Monday with eagerly awaited speeches on the war in Ukraine following the passage by an overwhelming majority last week of a law UN General Assembly resolution calling for “immediate” withdrawal of Russian troops.
There will also be tension at the end of the session when voting on the continuation of the work of the Ukraine investigators, who will present their first written report on March 20 after reporting war crimes in September.
Ukrainian Ambassador Yevheniia Filipenko is calling for a “strengthening” of the resolution defining the investigators’ mandate, but it is not certain that the final text will reflect this desire, given that Kiev and its Western allies will have to convince certain countries that are reluctant to let Moscow to criticize for increasing the ranks of teetotalers.
For the head of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard, the Russian invasion underscores “the weakening of an international legal system”. For this reason, and given the “large number of violations committed by Russian forces in the context of the conflict”, she calls on the HRC to take a “firm position”.
The renewal of the mandate of the rapporteur on the human rights situation in Russia will also be the subject of heated discussions.
For its part, the Office of the Prosecutor General of Ukraine said on Sunday that Russian forces have committed 71,586 war and aggression crimes in Ukraine since the start of the conflict. Ukrainian law enforcement also said the war killed at least 461 children and injured at least 927 in a year.