GENEVA, 26 Feb: U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will help kick off the latest and longest-ever session of the U.N.\u2019s top human rights body on Monday, with Iran\u2019s foreign minister, a senior Russian envoy, and the top diplomats of France and Germany among scores of leaders set to take part.
\nThe more than five-week session of the Human Rights Council opens as the world grapples with rights concerns including Russia\u2019s war in Ukraine, repression of dissent in Russia and Belarus, new violence between Palestinians and Israelis, and efforts to solidify a peace deal in Ethiopia that ended two years of conflict between the national government and rebels in the Tigray region.
\nThe council, made up of 47 members countries, takes up an extensive array of human rights issues \u2014 including discrimination, the freedom of religion, right to housing or the deleterious impact of economic sanctions targeting governments on regular people \u2014 as well as country \u201csituations\u201d like those in Afghanistan, Syria, Myanmar, Nicaragua and South Sudan. It usually meets three times a year.
\nProponents say the Geneva-based rights body has grown in importance as a diplomatic venue because the U.N. Security Council in New York has been increasingly divided in recent years due to a major rift between affiliations among its five permanent members: China and Russia on one side, Britain, France and the United States on the other.
\nOn Monday, among the speakers after Guterres and the presidents of Congo, Montenegro and Colombia, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian will come up between Germany\u2019s Annalena Baerbock and France\u2019s Catherine Colonna. China\u2019s foreign minister, Qin Gang, is set to make a statement by video.
\nAmirabdollahian\u2019s visit comes in the wake of vociferous and continued protests that erupted in Iran after the death in September of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini following her arrest by the country\u2019s morality police.
\nMoscow is set to be represented at the highest level since Russia suspended its council membership last year \u2014 largely because the U.N. General Assembly was on the cusp of stripping it. Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, known more for his expertise on defense matters, is set to attend on Thursday. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to speak by video message the same day.
\nA year ago, scores of diplomats walked out of the council chamber as Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov appeared by video, to express their opposition to Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine days earlier. He had originally been set to attend in person but many Western countries closed their airspace to flights from Russia after the invasion.
\nIn the session, the United States is likely to try to keep pressure on China over its record on issues over a crackdown on pro-democracy activists and others in Hong Kong, long-running concerns about Tibet, and others about the western region of Xinjiang \u2014 on which former U.N. human rights chief Michelle Bachelet issued a scathing report last fall just minutes before she left office.
\n\u201cWe will continue to shine a spotlight on documented abuses of Uyghurs and members of other ethnic and religious minority groups in Xinjiang by the PRC,\u201d said the U.S. ambassador to the council, Mich\u00e8le Taylor. \u201cWe are not going to just walk away from that … I don\u2019t have an answer right now for exactly what\u2019s planned, but I can tell you that we\u2019re engaged in robust conversations about what that might look like.\u201d
\nWestern diplomats say they are looking to see what tone the new U.N. human rights chief, Volker T\u00fcrk, takes on the issue. He is set to speak right after Guterres.
\nAmong other items on the agenda will be the possible renewal of the term of a team of experts, known as a Commission of Inquiry, on the impact of Russia\u2019s invasion of Ukraine, and Ethiopia\u2019s effort to prematurely end the mandate of a council-designated team of investigators who have been looking into rights issues related to the conflict with Tigray rebels. AP<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
GENEVA, 26 Feb: U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will help kick off the latest and longest-ever session of the U.N.\u2019s top human rights body on Monday, with Iran\u2019s foreign minister, a senior Russian envoy, and the top diplomats of France and Germany among scores of leaders set to take part. The more than five-week session of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-211779","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-world"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=211779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/211779\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=211779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=211779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arunachaltimes.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=211779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}