UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres yesterday demanded the immediate implementation of 30-day ceasefire in Syria as the Damascus regime continued its deadly bombardment of the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta.
Guterres praised the adoption of a UN Security Council resolution on Saturday calling for the truce, but said “Security Council resolutions are only meaningful if they are effectively implemented.”
“That is why I expect the resolution to be immediately implemented and sustained,” he told the opening of the 37th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Switzerland.
Photo: AFP
It is “high time to stop this hell on earth” in the Eastern Ghouta region, Guterres said.
Addressing the rights council after Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein said that Syria — and other conflict zones — had “become some of the most prolific slaughterhouses of humans in recent times.”
On the proposed Syria truce, Zeid said that “we have every reason to remain cautious.”
The resolution “must be viewed against a backdrop of seven years of failure to stop the violence, seven years of unremitting and frightful mass killing.”
Fresh bombardment by the Syrian regime yesterday killed at least 10 civilians in Eastern Ghouta, including nine members of one family, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitor group said.
Air strikes destroyed a building in Douma and buried alive an entire family, the Observatory said.
Zeid has repeatedly chastised the Security Council throughout the Syrian conflict for failing to refer the case to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Zeid yesterday blasted veto-wielding members for the Security Council’s intransigence on Syria and other conflicts, saying they bore “responsibility for the continuation of so much pain.”
“It is time, for the love of mercy, that China, Russia and the United States ... end the pernicious use of the veto,” he said.
Meanwhile, in Brussels, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Federica Mogherin demanded that the ceasefire be implemented “immediately.”
“Now that resoution needs to be immediately implemented, to have monitoring mechanisms,” she said as she arrived for a meeting of EU foreign ministers.
Luxembourg Minister of Foreign Affairs Jean Asselborn said the situation in Ghouta was a “disgrace,” describing it as like the “Middle Ages.”
In other developments, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Lavrov yesterday said the allegations that forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were to blame for a chlorine attack in Eastern Ghouta were a provocation aimed at sabotaging a ceasefire in the enclave.
The ceasefire for agreed to by the Security Council would take effect once all sides had agreed how it should be implemented, RIA news agency quoted him as saying.
However, al-Nusra militants in Eastern Ghouta and Idlib are not covered by the ceasefire, the Interfax agency quoted him as saying.
Additional reporting by Reuters and AP
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
PROTESTS: A crowd near Congress waved placards that read: ‘How can we have freedom without education?’ and: ‘No peace for the government’ Argentine President Javier Milei has made good on threats to veto proposed increases to university funding, with the measure made official early yesterday after a day of major student-led protests. Thousands of people joined the demonstration on Wednesday in defense of the country’s public university system — the second large-scale protest in six months on the issue. The law, which would have guaranteed funding for universities, was criticized by Milei, a self-professed “anarcho-capitalist” who came to power vowing to take a figurative chainsaw to public spending to tame chronically high inflation and eliminate the deficit. A huge crowd packed a square outside Congress
RSS