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UN launches probe into Venezuela rights abuses
GENEVA, Sept 27, 2019 (BSS/AFP) – The UN Human Rights Council on Friday
voted to send a team of investigators to probe alleged violations, including
extrajudicial executions and torture, in crisis-wracked Venezuela.
A resolution tabled by more than a dozen countries from Latin America and
elsewhere was adopted by the 47-member council with 19 votes in favour, seven
opposed and 21 abstaining.
It called for the UN’s top rights body to “dispatch urgently an
independent international fact-finding mission” to Venezuela.
The mission, the text said, should “investigate extrajudicial executions,
enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions and torture and other cruel,
inhumane or degrading treatment”.
“Venezuelans, men and women, cannot wait any longer” for justice, said the
representative of Peru, on behalf of the sponsoring nations, who also
included Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada and Israel.
The one-year mission should carry out its investigation “with a view to
ensuring full accountability for perpetrators and justice for victims,” said
the text, which also received the backing of the European Union.
Venezuelan Ambassador Jorge Valero slammed the resolution as a “hostile
initiative”, and said his country had no intention of cooperating with the
new probe.
“The imposition of an additional monitoring mechanism will never receive
the consent of my country,” he told the council.
Even when they are not granted access to a country, UN investigators can
nonetheless carry out probes from abroad, as has been the case with
investigations into abuses in Syria and Myanmar.
– ‘Systematic abuse’ –
The investigative team will be expected to present a report to the council
in a year.
Venezuela is caught in an economic crisis and a political standoff between
President Nicolas Maduro’s government and National Assembly leader Juan
Guaido.
The oil-rich country suffers from hyperinflation and shortages of basic
goods from food to medicine, a crisis that has forced some 3.6 million people
to flee since 2016.
Friday’s resolution deplored “the systematic abuse of state
institutions…, accelerating the erosion of the rule of law and of
democratic institutions” in Venezuela.
It also urged Caracas to release all “political prisoners” and voiced
“grave concern” over UN rights office findings in July suggesting that many
of the more than 6,000 killings in alleged confrontations with state forces
since early 2018 may in fact have been “executions”.
“It must be clear to all at this Council that when violations of this
gravity and scale are reported to us, we must respond in an equally serious
manner,” British Ambassador Julian Braithwaite, whose country backed the
resolution, told the council.
BSS/AFP/RY/1725 hrs