UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein yesterday condemned the Syrian government in a wide-ranging speech cataloguing human rights abuses around the world.
In a speech opening a three-week session of the UN Human Rights Council, Zeid said that Syria was one of five countries that routinely refused to cooperate with human rights investigators.
“This is a state led by a medical doctor and yet is believed to have gassed its own people; has attacked hospitals and bombed civilian neighborhoods with indiscriminate explosive weapons; and maintains tens of thousands of detainees in inhuman conditions,” Zeid said. “Words cannot convey how profoundly I condemn this situation.”
Photo: AP
The other countries are Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, and Iran, but Israel also had a long record of refusing cooperation in terms of access to occupied Palestinian territory, he added.
Venezuela had comprehensively denied access to Zeid’s staff, refusing his regional representative a visa for the past two and a half years, he said.
“States may shut my office out — but they will not shut us up; neither will they blind us. If access is refused us, we will assume the worst, and yet do our utmost to nonetheless report as accurately as we can on serious allegations,” he said.
The council, based in Geneva, is made up of 47 countries and aims to protect human rights around the world.
Zeid cited southeastern Turkey and the Ethiopian regions of Omoria and Amhara, Uzbekistan and both sides of the line of control between India and Pakistan as places that needed immediate investigation, as well as Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the Caucasus.
The situation in Yemen should be subjected to a “comprehensive inquiry by an international independent body,” and Bahrain should also pay more attention to human rights, he said.
“The past decade has demonstrated repeatedly and with punishing clarity exactly how disastrous the outcomes can be when a government attempts to smash the voices of its people, instead of serving them,” Zeid said in reference to Bahrain.
Zeid also took a swipe at the dangers of populism.
“A number of elections will be held in well-established democracies, with dangerous xenophobes and bigots running for office, and what falls to us then could begin to determine, as never before, the future course of ‘we the peoples’ of this Earth,” he said.
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