Russia was left out of the UN Human Rights Council this Tuesday, to which it hoped to return after being expelled in 2022 for invading Ukraine.
The country faced Albania and Bulgaria to occupy one of the two seats on offer today for the Eastern European regional group in the body, which is based in Geneva, Switzerland.
Other controversial candidates such as China or Cuba did manage to get a seat, in addition to countries such as France, the Netherlands, Ivory Coast or Japan, which had no competition, after a vote at the headquarters of the United Nations General Assembly, in New York.
Moscow only got 83 of the 97 votes required to win the position. China achieved 154 and Cuba 146.
The vote was secret, so it is not known which countries voted in favor of the candidate countries.
In addition to Russia, only Peru was left out of the Human Rights Council. The South American country won 108 votes, more than the 97 needed, but less than the rest of the candidates to occupy the three positions corresponding to the Latin American and Caribbean region: Cuba, Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
Thus, the final list of countries that managed today to obtain a seat on the Human Rights Council for the next three years were Albania, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burundi, China, Ivory Coast, Cuba, Dominican Republic, France, Ghana, Indonesia , Japan, Kuwait, Malawi and the Netherlands.
The organization Human Rights Watch had asked last week that UN representatives cast a blank vote or abstain from voting for China, which also had no competition in their group, and accused the authorities in Beijing of “detaining their critics, make them disappear or harass them when they are abroad.
This human rights entity was also against the entry of Cuba due to “the thousand political prisoners” who are detained in the country’s prisons.