Intelligence Services Have Penetrated and Corrupted Human Rights NGOs, Says Former Senior Lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner
On April 7, 2022, the UN General Assembly voted to exclude Russia from the UN Human Rights Council. The resolution received the required two-thirds majority of those voting, minus abstentions, in the 193-member Assembly, with 93 nations voting in favor and 24 against.[1]
The vote was highly politicized and reflected the success of the Western information war against Russia, which was falsely blamed for launching an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, and for committing the overwhelming majority of atrocities in the war, including a massacre at Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv, which independent investigators concluded was actually carried out by Ukraine.
Alfred de Zayas, a former senior lawyer with the Office of the UN High Commissioner and Secretary of the UN’s Human Rights Committee, wrote in his book The Human Rights Industry (Atlanta: Clarity Press, 2023) that the UN General Assembly’s decision to exclude Russia “added to the general atmosphere of Russophobia that we have seen over the last three decades,” and “to the world’s perception of engineered bias in the UN itself, where the manipulation of States’ votes was enabled by a failure to call for a secret ballot, as requested by Russia.”[2]
De Zayas noted further that, if exclusion were undertaken objectively by the General Assembly, one would expect the exclusion of other offenders, including but not limited to the following:
Several NATO countries, for the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by their force during the wars of aggression against Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, etc.
Saudi Arabia, among others, because of its genocidal war against the people of Yemen and because of the gruesome assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018.
India for its systematic war crimes and gross violations of human rights against the people of Khashmir, including widespread extra-judicial executions.
Azerbaijan because of its aggression against the hapless Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) during the blitzkrieg of September-November 2020, where the crime of aggression, war crimes and crimes against humanity were committed, including torture and execution of Armenian prisoners of war.
Decades of systematic killing of human rights defenders, social leaders, syndicalists and Indigenous peoples by successive Colombian governments and lethal paramilitary forces.
According to de Zayas, the UN’s Human Rights Council, since its creation in 2006, has not served human rights well; rather it has manifestly served the geopolitical and informational interests of the United States and the European Union.
These interests center on the demonization of Russia, which guarantees “that the maw of the U.S. military-industrial-digital-financial complex can continue to be fed, and its war on the world, contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations, can be pursued, even when it pushes the purported ‘rules-based’ international order.”[3]
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2024/06/07/intelligence-services-have-penetrated-and-corrupted-human-rights-ngos-says-former-senior-lawyer-with-the-office-of-the-un-high-commissioner/