Belskaya sharply criticised report of ‘independent experts on Belarus’ at UN
Larisa Belskaya, the Permanent Representative of the Republic of Belarus to the UN Office and Other International Organisations in Geneva, delivered a speech at the 58th session of the UN Human Rights Council on March 19th as part of the dialogue with the Group of Independent Experts on the Human Rights Situation in Belarus, sb.by reports with reference to Belarus’ Foreign Ministry
In her speech, responding to the standard set of claims contained in the so-called report of independent experts, Ms. Belskaya sharply criticised both the report itself and the practice of electoral country mechanisms, which makes a farce of the international aspect of human rights work.
“Based on reports on Belarus, the West introduces the unilateral coercive measures, justifies interference in internal affairs and electoral processes, finances those who bet on the destruction of the Belarusian statehood and lobbies for sanctions to harm the country in which they failed to seize power. It is their position that is used as a source of information for such reports (similar to the one presented in the Human Rights Council today).
The drafters of the report are so ‘independent’ that they can pass off a purely ideological approach as objective analysis and are not responsible for the reliability of the information and for how their far-fetched and, in some cases, outright slanderous conclusions will be used in the future.
Anyone who critically examines the document, presented as a report by an ‘independent group of experts’, will be convinced that it is an unsubstantiated custom-made essay, designed to somehow explain why the EU has designated Belarus a ‘persistent human rights violator’.
“Both the panel of experts and the special rapporteur are spending considerable UN resources to make unsubstantiated assumptions in the style of ‘there are reasonable grounds to believe’,” Ms. Belskaya noted.
