UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has informed the UN General Assembly that 15 countries, including oil producer Venezuela, are in arrears in paying their annual contribution to the UN regular budget, which means they cannot vote in the 193-member world body unless there are exceptional circumstances.
Ban’s letter dated Monday last week and circulated on Friday also included Iran, another major oil producer, which was under UN sanctions over its nuclear program until Saturday last week, when they were lifted. However, assembly spokesman Daniel Thomas on Friday said that Iran “just paid,” so it can now vote.
The loss of voting rights in the General Assembly is perhaps most embarrassing for Venezuela, which is currently a member of the Security Council and will hold its rotating presidency next month. Being in arrears does not affect its voting right in the council, but being on the list can be seen as a loss of status at the UN.
Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs did not immediately return a request for comment on its lost vote in the General Assembly.
Venezuela is in economic meltdown. Its economy shrank 10 percent last year, according to the IMF, and inflation is running well into the triple digits. The country relies on oil for almost all of its export earnings, and its already severe shortage of dollars has gotten exponentially worse as the price of oil has cratered.
The government blames its lack of hard currency on right-wing enemies of the state who it says are purposefully trying to sabotage the economy.
The secretary-general’s letter notes that the General Assembly can permit member states to vote “if it is satisfied that the failure to pay is due to conditions beyond the control of the member.”
The assembly did pass a resolution giving five poor and conflict-torn countries on the list the right to vote during the current session which ends in September — Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Sao Tome and Principe, Somalia and Yemen.
The letter gives the minimum payment that the nine other countries must make to have their voting right restored.
The amounts range from just under US$3 million for Venezuela and US$2.1 million for the Dominican Republic to US$2,155 for Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and US$1,360 for Burundi.
The five other countries that have lost their voting rights are Bahrain, Libya, Mali, the Marshall Islands and Vanuatu.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion