A group of eleven of the world’s most notoriously oppressive regimes, including Venezuela, Russia, North Korea, and Belarus, complained to a U.N. official that language condemning Western sanctions on their regimes has not been included in U.N. documents. In a letter Sunday, they decried those measures as an “existential” threat to their survival, National Review has learned.
Dictatorships targeted by sanctions imposed for human-rights abuses and other misbehavior have long attempted to redefine these policies as “unilateral-coercive measures” in U.N. and international legal documents, and they’ve spent years trying to use international bodies to cast doubt on their legality.
With these complaints, they’re hoping to set the agenda at big meetings at the U.N. this week for a major international-development conference and the annual U.N. General Assembly open debate, where heads of state will take the stage.
Ambassadors for dictatorships wrote to Dennis Francis, the president of the U.N. General Assembly, with their complaints. National Review obtained a copy of the letter, in which these regimes expressed outrage about their exclusion from the negotiation process surrounding high-profile, but symbolic, political documents.
“As you are aware, the issue of the negative impact of unilateral coercive measures (UCMs) is an existential one for our peoples. A third of the world’s population is affected by these illegal measures,” stated their letter, which was mounted on letterhead from Venezuela’s government. In addition to Venezuela, other signatories included representatives for Belarus, Iran, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Cuba, Russia, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, and Zimbabwe.
All these regimes have been targeted by sanctions imposed by the U.S. and other countries over their human-rights abuses.
They also asserted that sanctions impose a heavy toll “on targeted countries’ capacities to achieve sustainable development to make further progress in protecting the right to health of their respective populations.”
They said that “U.N. sources,” backed their claims. They were possibly referring to the work of Alena Douhan, a Belarusian academic who holds a post as a U.N. expert and routinely launders dictatorships’ complaints about sanctions.
China was not a signatory to the document, although the letter claimed that the group’s demands had been echoed by the Group of 77 and China, a collection of 135 developing countries.
These countries had strived to get their anti-sanctions agenda into a political document about the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals — the organization’s signature development agenda — during a conference that took place over the weekend. The document on the Sustainable Development Goals was adopted Monday without their preferred changes.
The inclusion of their preferred language, even in a symbolic political document, would have made for a substantial propaganda victory and a blow against policies that punish authoritarian governments and promote human rights.
But the letter’s signatories still hope to shape other documents that will be adopted at U.N. meetings this week, including declarations on global pandemic response, universal health coverage, and the fight against tuberculosis.
They asserted that the adoption of these documents this week is purely symbolic, until the General Assembly holds votes on them and asked Francis to circulate their letter.