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Tag: Executive vetoes

  • Global statesmen: UN needs to be more muscular and united

    Global statesmen: UN needs to be more muscular and united

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    UNITED NATIONS — The United Nations needs to be more muscular and united if it wants to remain a central player in tackling the world’s multiple escalating crises, a group of elder statesmen founded by Nelson Mandela said Friday.

    Former world leaders in the group known as The Elders told Associated Press executives that the U.N.’s most powerful organ, the Security Council, needs to address the paralyzing impact of its vetoes, and the secretary-general of the 193-member world organization needs to speak out on violations of international law.

    The United Nations was founded on the ashes of World War II so countries could work together to prevent future wars and solve other global challenges, but it now faces an increasingly polarized world.

    The failure of the Security Council to adopt a legally binding resolution addressing Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine and its violations of the U.N. Charter because of Russia’s veto power has put a spotlight on the growing global divisions, the future of the United Nations and calls for U.N. reforms.

    Former U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki-moon, The Elders’ deputy chairman, said he told Security Council ambassadors at a private breakfast just before the AP meeting that “we are living in a world where multilateralism is in crisis” — and the United Nations “is most responsible for that.”

    Multilateralism is the foundation of the United Nations and Ban pointed especially to the Security Council, which is charged with ensuring international peace and security but has failed to take action on the war in Ukraine and other global challenges that have divided its five permanent veto-wielding members — Russia, China, the United States, Britain and France.

    “Without unity of the Security Council, nothing can happen,” Ban said. “I really urged strongly to the members of the Security Council this morning that they should consider very seriously how they are going to keep their credibility and prestige and why they are not united.”

    Ban said he suggested that council members should seriously consider changing the way they make decisions, which he called “illogical” and “unreasonable”: All 15 members have veto power on council presidential statements and press statements, which are recommendations and not legally binding, and the five permanent members have veto power on resolutions that are legally binding.

    This “really disrupts the credibility of the United Nations,” Ban said.

    Asked whether the U.N. can be an effective and powerful advocate for ending the Ukraine war, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, the former U.N high commissioner for human rights, said as long as Russia has veto power that the U.N. Secretariat, led by the secretary-general, should use its power as custodian of multiple treaties to act as “a referee” and call out countries that are violating international law and international humanitarian law.

    He said that would give cover to other countries, including those facing economic pressures and food insecurity, to side with the secretary-general.

    Former Irish President Mary Robinson, chairwoman of The Elders, said U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has made progress on the humanitarian side in helping broker a deal enabling grain shipments from Ukraine to world markets and on protection for the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, which is under Russian control in southeast Ukraine.

    “But I think there is a voice that would help — a political voice as part of the equation,” said Robinson, who also served as a high commissioner for human rights. “I think we would urge the secretary-general to use his good offices because it is such a crisis.”

    Former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo said the situation regarding Russia “is special and different” because “Russia is saying in Ukraine: ‘If I don’t get my way I threaten to use nuclear weapons.’”

    To those who say that Russia’s actions shouldn’t be raised without raising unilateral attacks against other countries, Zedillo said, “If we want to speak with moral authority, we must say very clearly that all members of the international community, irrespective of their powers, must be obedient of international law.”

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  • UN assembly to meet on Ukraine hours after Russian strikes

    UN assembly to meet on Ukraine hours after Russian strikes

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    UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. General Assembly was due to start debate Monday on whether to demand that Russia reverse course on annexing four regions of Ukraine, but the discussion came as Moscow’s most extensive missile strikes in months alarmed much of the international community anew.

    The assembly meeting, planned before Monday’s barrage, was intended to respond to Russia’s purported absorption last month of Ukraine’s Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions. The move followed Kremlin-orchestrated “referendums” that the Ukrainian government and the West have dismissed as illegitimate.

    But countries may take the occasion to speak out on the Monday morning rush-hour attacks that hit at least 14 Ukrainian regions, including the capital of Kyiv, and killed at least 11 people. Russia said it targeted military and energy facilities. But some of the missiles smashed into civilian areas.

    Russia said it was retaliating for what it called a Ukrainian “terrorist” attack Saturday on an important bridge. Ukrainian presidential adviser Mikhail Podolyak has called the bridge accusation “too cynical even for Russia.”

    The U.N. assembly was set to gather in the afternoon to consider a proposed resolution that would condemn the “referendums” and claimed annexations as illegal.

    The European Union-led measure also would demand that Moscow “immediately and unconditionally” scrap its purported annexations, call on all countries not to recognize them and insist upon the immediate, complete and unconditional withdrawal of Russian forces from all of Ukraine’s internationally recognized territory.

    A vote is expected later in the week. Russia wants secret balloting, an unusual move that would need to win a procedural vote in itself.

    Russia recently vetoed a similar but legally binding U.N. Security Council resolution that would have condemned the supposed annexations. Under a decision made earlier this year, Security Council vetoes must now be explained in the General Assembly.

    The assembly doesn’t allow vetoes and its resolutions aren’t legally binding. During the war, the assembly has voted to demand that Russia withdraw, to blame Moscow for the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and to suspend Russia from the U.N. Human Rights Council.

    Meanwhile, the Security Council has been stalemated because of Russia’s veto power.

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  • Russia vetoes UN resolution calling its referendums illegal

    Russia vetoes UN resolution calling its referendums illegal

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    UNITED NATIONS — Russia vetoed a U.N. resolution Friday that would have condemned its referendums in four Ukrainian regions as illegal, declared them invalid and urged all countries not to recognize any annexation of the territory claimed by Moscow.

    The vote in the 15-member Security Council was 10-1 with China, India, Brazil and Gabon abstaining.

    The resolution would also have demanded an immediate halt to Russia’s “full-scale unlawful invasion of Ukraine” and the immediate and unconditional withdrawal of all its military forces from Ukraine.

    U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield said before the vote that in the event of a Russian veto, the U.S. and Albania who sponsored the resolution will take it to the 193-member General Assembly where there are no vetoes, “and show that the world is still on the side of sovereignty and protecting territorial integrity.”

    The council vote came hours after a lavish Kremlin ceremony where President Vladimir Putin signed treaties to annex the Russian-occupied Ukrainian regions of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia, saying they were now part of Russia and would be defended by Moscow.

    Thomas-Greenfield said the results of the “sham” referendums on whether the regions wanted to join Russia were “pre-determined in Moscow, and everybody knows it.” “They were held behind the barrel of Russian guns,” she said.

    Adding that “the sacred principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity” at the heart of the U.N. Charter must be defended, she said, “All of us understand the implications for our own borders, our own economies, and our own countries if these principles are tossed aside.”

    “Putin miscalculated the resolve of the Ukrainians,” Thomas-Greenfield said. “The Ukrainian people have demonstrated loud and clear: They will never accept being subjugated to Russian rule.”

    Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia defended the referendums, claiming that more than 100 international observers from Italy, Germany, Venezuela and Latvia who observed the voting recognized the outcomes as legitimate.

    “The results of the referendums speak for themselves. The residents of these regions do not want to return to Ukraine. They have made a an informed and free choice in favor of our country,” he said.

    Nebenzia added: “There will be no turning back as today’s draft resolution would try to impose.”

    He accused Western nations on the council of “openly hostile actions,” saying they reached “a new low” by putting forward a resolution condemning a council member and forcing a Russian veto so they can “wax lyrical.”

    Under a resolution adopted earlier this year, Russia must defend its veto before the General Assembly in the coming weeks.

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