A group of countries, including Russia and China, sent a petition to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet, asking for the need to lift unilateral sanctions in the package of priority measures to combat the epidemic COVID-19, follows from a letter published by the Foreign Minister Venezuelan Jorge Arreasoy.
Earlier, Russian Permanent Representative to the UN Vasily Nebenzya at a meeting of the UN Security Council called on the threat of coronavirus to cancel all unilateral and multilateral sanctions against developing countries introduced by the UN. In early April, the head of the State Duma’s Committee on Foreign Affairs Leonid Slutsky called on politicians from the European Union, the United States, Great Britain and inter-parliamentary organizations to abandon the sanctions policy.
Russia invited the UN General Assembly to adopt the Declaration of Solidarity in the fight against coronavirus, but the United States, EU, UK, Ukraine and Georgia did not allow the adoption of the Russian draft resolution, calling for the lifting of unilateral sanctions.
“Please include in the current package of priority measures in connection with the COVID-19 epidemic the need to repeal unilateral coercive measures, since these measures directly or indirectly affect fundamental human rights, including the right to develop hundreds of millions of people around the world collateral damage to a wide range of economic and social rights”, – the letter says.
According to the text, among these countries are Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, Cuba, North Korea, Iran, Cambodia, Zimbabwe and Nicaragua. The authors of the statement indicate that financial and banking restrictions, as well as broad secondary sanctions against various sectors of the economy of the affected countries, deprived these countries of their own financial resources and impede the import of life-saving products – medicines and medical equipment.
UN Secretary General António Guterres earlier called on G20 countries to lift sanctions against other states in order to more effectively combat the spread of coronavirus. Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, also spoke out for lifting or suspending sanctions in a pandemic.
The World Health Organization on March 11 announced an outbreak of a new coronavirus infection COVID-19 with a pandemic. According to the latest WHO data, more than 2.39 million cases of infection have been recorded in the world, over 162 thousand people have died.