Cuba warned about attempts to turn the UN Human Rights Council into a platform aimed against countries refusing to bow to the geopolitical interests of powerful states.
By Roberto Morejón
Cuba warned about attempts to turn the UN Human Rights Council into a platform aimed against countries refusing to bow to the geopolitical interests of powerful states.
Once again, the largest of the Antilles is present at the work of the Council, this time at its 52nd session, an opportunity in which Havana calls attention to the pressures of the United States and others on that body.
In a forceful message, with truths stated in a direct and well-argued manner, Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla warned that coercion "erodes the credibility of the Council", whose sessions are being held in the Swiss city of Geneva.
It is not the first time that in UN meetings and other organizations, the Caribbean nation calls each issue by its name, bluntly, in relation to the plans of certain countries to, as the head of Cuban diplomacy said, take the current Council back to the conduct of the defunct Commission on Human Rights, which was detonated by those practices.
Cuba is right to highlight the maneuvers in the Council to transform it into a spearhead against countries harassed by the United States, whose administrations insist on presenting the power of the North as a paradigm in human rights.
Underpinned by this artifice, the United States usually attacks Cuba for alleged transgressions of citizens' freedoms.
However, in the land of José Martí, the full exercise of these emancipations is advocated and the principles of universality, indivisibility, objectivity and non-selectivity in the treatment of individuals are respected.
Paradoxically, Washington does impinge on the prerogatives of Cubans by maintaining the intensified blockade and applying additional punishments by including it on the list of those who, it alleges, sponsor terrorism.
In this sense, Rodriguez Parrilla was emphatic in Geneva when he reiterated a permanent demand from Cuba and the countries of the South to stop politicizing the issue of human rights.
As the Foreign Minister of Cuba said, it is necessary to break down pressures, unilateral visions and benefit respectful and constructive dialogue as well as cooperation.
It is to be hoped that the United States and other countries of the industrialized North will listen to voices like those of Cuba so that the atmosphere of the UN Human Rights Council is not vitiated.
