The Glaring Holes in Michelle Bachelet’s Venezuela Human Rights Report
Roger Harris reports on how UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s recent report is a gift to US regime change efforts in Venezuela.
UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet’s report on Venezuela echoes the US government’s talking points, which are designed to terminate the two-decade-old Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela. The report fails to acknowledge Venezuela’s manifest accomplishments or even recognize victims of US-backed right-wing violence in Venezuela. The US economic war against Venezuela, US threats of a “military option,” and opposition violence are treated in the Bachelet report as figments of the imagination, “alleged internal and external threats.”
Meanwhile, the US government brazenly brags on an official State Department website:
The pressure campaign is working. The financial sanctions we have placed on the Venezuelan Government has forced it to begin becoming in default, both on sovereign and PDVSA, its oil company’s, debt. And what we are seeing…is a total economic collapse in Venezuela. So our policy is working, our strategy is working and we’re going to keep it on the Venezuelans.”
Bachelet’s UN report one-sidedly assigns blame to the victim. Activist and researcher Nino Pagliccia called the report “faulty by design.”
Reaction to the Bachelet report
The New York Times and the other usual cheerleaders for regime change in Venezuela predictably cheered the report, which came out a day before its scheduled July 5 release date.
The government of Venezuela, having been issued an advanced copy of the Bachelet report, immediately delivered a 70-point bill of particulars in rebuttal. Human rights organizations representing victims of the right-wing violence in Venezuela had met with Bachelet and provided documentation of abuses but their stories were omitted. This included the mother of an Afro-descendent son who had been caught in a passing opposition demonstration, doused with gasoline, and burned alive. Spain, however, just arrested a suspect in that crime who was hiding in Spain.
The day following the issuance of the report, representatives of Russia, China, Turkey, Belarus, Myanmar, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Bolivia on the UN Human Rights Council repudiated the Bachelet report. According to the Cuban representative, the report “represents a campaign to destabilize the democratic process.” The Nicaraguan representative at the Human Rights Council session condemned the unilateral and illegal measures imposed by the US that were egregiously ignored in the Bachelet report, adding these very measures have a “negative impact on the promotion and protection of human rights” in Venezuela. The Bolivian representative called for the cessation of the US unilateral coercive measures against Venezuela, which are causing great economic loss and misery for the people there.
A little over a month prior to the issuance of the Bachelet report, the International Committee for Peace, Justice and Dignity launched a letter campaign to Ms. Bachelet and the Secretary General of the UN calling for the intervention by the High Commissioner to put an end to the US blockade has kept lifesaving medicines out of Venezuela. Bachelet did not respond to that request. The International Committee warns:
It is extremely serious that the Bachelet report does not contribute to the dialogue for peace, instead it tilts the scales in favor of the aggressor while ignoring the damage the Empire has done to the people.”
UN special rapporteur Alfred de Zayas issued his report on Venezuela to the same UN Human Rights Council last September. He recommended that the US economic sanctions against Venezuela be investigated by the International Criminal Court as possible crimes against humanity. A former secretary of the Human Rights Council and a specialist in international law, de Zayas “believes his report has been ignored because it goes against the popular narrative that Venezuela needs regime change.”
https://www.mintpressnews.com/glaring-holes-michelle-bachelet-venezuela-human-rights-report/260552/
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