The United Nations General Assembly on Thursday is voting on whether to remove Russia from the Human Rights Council amid global outrage over harrowing scenes of death and destruction discovered in Ukraine following the retreat of Russian forces.
A majority vote would suspend Russia as a member of the organization’s top human rights body, marking a global statement that Moscow’s actions in Ukraine strip its legitimacy on the body.
The vote was proposed by Ukraine’s mission to the U.N., which is also a member of the Human Rights Council. Established in 2006, the council built into its founding a mechanism to suspend the membership of a council member “that commits gross and systematic violations of human right.”
A resolution passed by the Human Rights Council on March 4 expressed grave concern of “gross and systemic” human rights violations and “violations of international humanitarian law” committed by Russia in its war against Ukraine.
Russia was elected to the council in 2020 and was expected to serve a three-year term. Countries are elected to membership of the 47-nation body by a vote in the General Assembly, with both secret and direct ballot.
Russia has denied that any Ukrainian civilians were killed by its forces, calling accusations of war crimes by international leaders a “provocation” from Ukraine.
The foreign ministers of the Group of Seven nations, which Russia was kicked out of in 2014 over its invasion of Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula, released a joint statement on Thursday ahead of the General Assembly vote condemning “in the strongest terms the atrocities committed by the Russian armed forces in Bucha and a number of other Ukrainian towns,” citing civilian deaths, victims of torture, apparent executions and reports of sexual violence and destruction of civilian infrastructure.
The statement continued that the atrocities uncovered “show the true face of Russia’s brutal war of aggression against Ukraine and its people.”
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has accused Russia of committing genocide after Ukrainian forces confronted scores of dead men, women and children, found bound and blindfolded, shot at close range and left for dead on streets in Bucha, Irpin and Dymerka, three suburban towns outside Kyiv.
President Biden has called Putin a war criminal and said the images from Bucha constitute “nothing less happening than major war crimes.”
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