At least twenty former foreign ministers of Latin American countries, Nobel Peace Prize winners, presidents of foundations and other figures defending rights They sent a letter raising their “voice of protest” against what they called a systematic attack by the Russian Federation in Ukraine.
According to the criteria of
This text is addressed to António Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations, to whom they describe the situation as a “monstrous violation of the Charter of the United Nations by a permanent member of the Security Council.”
Furthermore, they point out that, as Latin Americans, it is an important issue because “Latin America contributed significantly to the introduction of the prohibition of the use of force in Article 2.4 of the Charter of the United Nations,” as well as to advances in law. international.
Therefore, they consider that the rules against violent actions “should not be applied selectively.”
It is necessary to mention that multilateral organizations have described as a violation of human rights and international humanitarian law actions that Russia has implemented in the midst of its invasion of Ukraine and that, according to the UN, In almost three years, it has left 11,743 civilians murdered and more than 24,000 injured.
Because of these continuous attacks, personalities such as Noemí Sanín, Guillermo Fernández de Soto and Carolina Barco, former ministers of Foreign Affairs of Colombiaas well as their peers from the countries Chile, Peru, Mexico, Brazil, Guatemala, Bolivia, Uruguay, Panama and Costa Rica They sent the following letter:
Dear Mr. Secretary General:
At this very moment, civilians are being systematically attacked and killed by the Russian Federation throughout Ukraine. We are a group of Latin Americans and Ukrainians who want, together, to raise our voice in protest against this monstrous violation of the Charter of the United Nations by a permanent member of the Security Council.
Night after night, missiles and bombs rain down on Ukrainian cities with no other purpose than to kill and terrorize the population. According to the latest report of the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine (March 2024), “attacks with explosive weapons in populated areas remain the leading cause of death and injury among civilians in Ukraine.” Commission figures show that 84% of the 10,582 civilian deaths in Ukraine (as of February 15, 2024) are due to these types of attacks. This is not a coincidence, but rather evidence of a pattern of criminal behavior.
Examples abound. In an attack on a cafe in Hroza in October 2023, 59 people were killed, including 36 women. The report on the massacre by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights states that “the OHCHR has reasonable grounds to believe that there were no military personnel or any other legitimate military objectives present or in the vicinity of the reception at the coffee that followed the funeral held in the cemetery on the outskirts of town.”
In another attack in June last year in Kramatorsk (which some of us witnessed), a pizzeria was destroyed by an Iskander missile. 13 people died, including the great writer Victoria Amelina, and 64 were injured. A week later, while Victoria was being buried in her hometown of Lviv, more than 1,000 km from the front, a nearby residential building was hit by a Russian missile, leaving 10 people dead and 48 injured.
Week after week, Ukraine suffers these savage attacks. Recently, another Iskander missile fell on a hotel in Kramatorsk, killing one member of a Reuters team and seriously injuring others. According to OHCHR figures, July and August have been the deadliest months in two years. Hence all the urgency.
The fact that civilians have been killed in virtually every oblast of Ukraine, as OHCHR maps show, also demonstrates that the attacks have little relationship to the development of hostilities. Rather, they are integral to a campaign to terrorize the entire population of Ukraine.
They also do not stop attacking civilian objects. We have seen how hospitals, including
children’s hospitals are destroyed, as happened in Dnipro and Kyiv; how libraries and printing presses go up in flames, as happened in Kherson and Kharkiv (Russia has destroyed 138 libraries, according to the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture); how a large shopping center is leveled in broad daylight by a guided bomb, as happened in Kharkiv in May. Truth Hounds, an organization that documents war crimes, established that the bomb in this attack was “integrated into the guidance kit with inertial and satellite navigation systems.”
Attacks are sometimes repeated immediately, in what is known as the “double strike” tactic, intended to cause maximum damage. The OHCHR documented in its latest report on Ukraine “five cases in which high-precision munitions hit the same place or target… twice in a short period of time, causing death or injury to first aid personnel, police , paramedics and other civilian first responders who helped the victims of the first impact.”
It is easy to see a pattern and detect a policy in all of these attacks, in line with the Rome Statute’s definition of crimes against humanity: a crime committed “as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population and with knowledge of such attack.” stroke”.
But what we are witnessing in Ukraine goes beyond the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity. Rather, it is the complete disregard of the Geneva Conventions and the Additional Protocols, which for so long have provided civilians with their only protection in times of war and are one of humanity’s great achievements.
The Russian Federation’s strategy of deliberately attacking and killing civilians in Ukraine threatens to turn the entire edifice of International Humanitarian Law into an empty shell, with consequences that go far beyond Ukraine.
It is true, Mr. Secretary, that the erosion of IHL began long before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Scholars place it in the conduct by the United States of the so-called “war on terror.”
It is also true that atrocious war crimes and crimes against humanity are being committed in other places at the same time, as we know from the images of Gaza that we see with horror on our television screens. And then there are the war crimes we can’t see, like in Sudan.
All these crimes must be condemned. Ignoring certain violations while denouncing others due to geopolitical preferences contributes to weakening the protection of civilians. Double standards are double standards, regardless of ideology.
As Latin Americans, this matters to us in a particular way. Latin America contributed significantly to the introduction of the prohibition on the use of force in Article 2.4 of the United Nations Charter and to many other advances in international law and human rights, such as the codification of the crime of forced disappearance in the Statute of Rome. Having suffered so much, we believe that the rules should not be applied selectively.
But it is also true that the Russian Federation represents a special case, because it is a permanent member of the Security Council to whom, as such, all members of the United Nations have entrusted the “primary responsibility for maintaining international peace and security.” ”, according to the UN Charter. The Charter also states that “in the performance of these functions, the Security Council shall act in accordance with the Purposes and Principles of the United Nations” (Art. 24).
Latin America has long drawn attention to the great responsibility that comes with being a permanent member. At the founding conference of the UN in San Francisco in 1945, Colombian Foreign Minister and future president Alberto Lleras voted against granting veto power (no other country did so except Cuba) and noted below that conferring veto power on permanent members constituted “an exorbitant test of the confidence of the other associated countries in the United Nations Organization.”
Exorbitant, without a doubt. It is this trust of the community of nations that the Russian Federation has comprehensively betrayed. We therefore ask you to convey this message to the Security Council and the General Assembly, and to ask the President of the Assembly to consider whether the Russian Federation should not be suspended from the Assembly, as South Africa was in 1974, until behaves in a manner consistent with its responsibilities under the Charter and with the expectations of Member States.
#letter #ministers #figures #Latin #America #António #Guterres #Secretary #General #situation #Ukraine #Civilians #attacked #murdered