Venezuela on Thursday celebrated its new seat on the UN’s most powerful body as a global ratification of the country’s socialist revolution.
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro appeared on television and led his Cabinet in an extended round of applause shortly after Venezuela won a temporary place on the UN Security Council.
The country ran unopposed for the slot allocated to Latin America and the Caribbean, but still needed approval from the UN General Assembly to claim the long-sought diplomatic trophy.
Photo: AFP
Former Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez tried for one of the 10 non-permanent seats on the council in 2006, but the US blocked his campaign. The fight played out over dozens of rounds of deadlocked voting. The display of disunity prompted the region’s countries to start alternating the seat on a rotating basis, and this year it was Venezuela’s turn.
The US decided to stay out of the contest, but did condemn the selection after the fact.
“Unfortunately, Venezuela’s conduct at the UN has run counter to the spirit of the UN Charter, and its violations of human rights at home are at odds with the Charter’s letter,” US Ambassador Samantha Power said in a statement.
Diplomats from some other countries neglected to mention Venezuela in their well-wishes. The oil-exporting nation has taken aggressive stances against the foreign policy of the US and its allies and it backs countries on bad terms with Washington, including Russia, Iran and Syria.
Maduro said the win showed the support the international community has for Chavez’s vision.
“The entire world, regardless of their ideology, knows what is happening in Venezuela,” Maduro said.
The victory comes on the heels of a report from a UN body condemning Venezuela for taking political prisoners during a crackdown on antigovernment protests this spring.
The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions called on Venezuela to immediately release Venezuelan opposition leader Leopoldo Lopez, who has been jailed since February for his role in the demonstrations.
Last week, Venezuelan Minister of Foreign Affairs Rafael Ramirez rejected the findings as an attempt to interfere with the nation’s sovereignty.
One thing was notably absent from the celebrations in Caracas — the fiery anti-US rhetoric famously deployed by Chavez, who once called former US president George W. Bush the “devil” during a speech at the UN.
Venezuela is to join the council on Jan. 1 and serve for two years, aided in part by Chavez’s daughter, who was recently named part of the Venezuelan mission to the UN.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the