February 28, Pozirk. The international dimension of human rights causes “disputes and conflicts instead of unity,” Belarusian Deputy Foreign Minister Juryj Ambrazievič told the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday.
The diplomat delivered his address via video link, dedicating it to the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights marked in December.
He linked armed conflicts to accusations of “utopian human rights standards” violations, claiming that Western countries manipulate human rights to discredit their opponents and exercise pressure on them.
The United States and the European Union use their global domination to promote human rights as a “pretext for interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign and independent states and imposing economic and other restrictions against countries [they deem] undesirable,” Ambrazievič said.
Such policies harm international relations as a whole, while double standards in the approaches to human rights aggravate the situation, the diplomat noted.
The authors of the declaration had an illusion that “if all states obliged to respect human rights, more precisely, to prevent violence by the state against an individual, by one race or social group against the other – what they saw as the root of the ideology of fascism and its horrible crimes, including genocide against the people of Belarus – there would be no basis for civil and international conflicts,” he noted.
