Venezuela joins the UN human rights council.
The UN has elected Venezuela to its human rights council, despite the fact that basic human rights are not respected under the Maduro regime. A UN General Assembly meeting in Geneva saw the Latin American country elected to one of 14 new seats on the 47-member body. Two days ago, Louis Charbonneau at Human Rights Watch urged member states to vote against Venezuela.
"A vote for Venezuela is a vote for the torture, murder, and impunity that have become trademarks of President Nicolás Maduro's government," he said, calling it a "slap in the face to the millions who have fled the country". Opposition activists, journalists and human rights defenders are often jailed, while security forces loyal to Maduro commit abuses with impunity. Venezuela’s government registered nearly 5,300 killings (which means the unofficial number mst be much higher) during "security operations" in 2018 linked to cases of “resistance to authority.” The Venezuelan Violence Observatory puts the number of murdered civilians by Maduro's security forces of at least 7,523 such killings of that type in 2018 alone. To put it bluntly, Maduro murdered at least five thousands people without any due procces, in a single year.
Maduro regime armored jeeps run over Venezulean protesters.
Fifty-four international and Venezuelan organizations, including Human Rights Watch, declared Venezuela unfit for council membership on October 10. In September, the council passed a resolution establishing an independent fact-finding mission to investigate allegations of extrajudicial executions, enforced disappearances, arbitrary arrests, torture, and other cruel or degrading treatment committed in Venezuela since 2014. Venezuela rejected that resolution.
Maduro's regime is accused of jailing, torturing and arbitrarily arresting opposition figures, while dismantling any vestiges of democratic rule and rule of law in Venezuela. It is esitmated that around 4 million Venezuelans have fled the country in recent years, fleeing the regimes brutality, hyperinflation, political crisis and lack of any econmical prospect in the Socialist ruled country.
Picture shows the mass exodus of refugees fleeing from Venezuela in 2018. The members of the human rights council are suppose to work to uphold and promote human rights around the world, but in reality the opposite usually happens. What can you expect when the council comprised of totalitarian brutal states like China, Saudi Arabia and Cuba just to name a few. The UN human rights council in its present form is a farce, and has to be disbanded and reorganized in a way that will ensure that the countries that do the most to deny basic human right to its own people, like Venezuela, will not allowed to be members of it.
