Venezuela won a seat on the UN Human Rights Council on Thursday despite a campaign by over 50 organisations and many countries opposed to Nicolas Maduro’s government and its rights record.
There was scattered applause in the General Assembly chamber when its president announced the results of the voting for two Latin American seats. Brazil topped the ballot with 153 votes followed by Venezuela with 105 votes and late entry Costa Rica with 96 votes.
Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza called the vote “a victory” that followed “a fierce and brutal campaign by the United States … and its subordinate nations.”
Israel’s UN Ambassador Danny Danon said in a statement immediately after Thursday’s results were announced that: “The Human Rights Council continues to abandon human rights and is now in the business of protecting dictators and war crimes.”
“In Venezuela, a dictator starves his people, and in Libya there are camps that torture African migrants,” Danon said.
“That one of the world’s worst human-rights abusers would be granted a seat on a body that is supposed to defend human rights is utterly appalling,” Craft said in a statement after the vote.
Philippe Bolopion, Human Rights Watch’s deputy director for global advocacy, called Venezuela’s election “undeserved” and “a slap in the face to the country’s countless victims who’ve been tortured and murdered by government forces, as well as the millions who have fled largely because of a humanitarian emergency the government unleashed.”
Source: Times of Israel
