• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

U.N. ends Yemen war crimes probe in defeat for Western states

October 8, 2021 by David Barret Leave a Comment

October 8, 2021

(This October 7 story has corrected first name of Dutch ambassador to Paul Bekkers not Peter Bekker in 6th paragraph)

By Stephanie Nebehay

GENEVA (Reuters) – Bahrain, Russia and other members of the U.N. Human Rights Council pushed through a vote on Thursday to shut down the body’s war crimes investigations in Yemen, in a stinging defeat for Western states who sought to keep the mission going.

Members narrowly voted to reject a resolution led by the Netherlands to give the independent investigators another two years to monitor atrocities in Yemen’s conflict.

It marked the first time in the council’s 15-year history that a resolution was defeated.

The independent investigators have said in the past that potential war crimes have been committed by all sides in the seven-year conflict that has pitted a Saudi-led coalition against Iran-allied Houthi rebels.

More than 100,000 people have been killed and 4 million have been displaced, activist groups say.

Dutch ambassador Paul Bekkers said the vote was a major setback. “I cannot help but feel that this Council has failed the people of Yemen,” he told delegates.

“With this vote, the Council has effectively ended its reporting mandate, it has cut this lifeline of the Yemeni people to the international community.”

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres still believes there is a need for accountability in Yemen, spokesman Stephane Dujarric told reporters in New York.

“We will continue to press for accountability in Yemen, a place … in which civilians have seen repeated crimes committed against them,” Dujarric said.

Ambassador Katharine Stasch, Germany’s ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva, told the council: “While we acknowledge the (Saudi-led) coalition’s efforts to investigate civilian casualty claims through the joint incidents assessment team, we are convinced that it is indispensable to have a U.N.-mandated international, independent mechanism working towards accountability for the Yemeni people.”

Rights activists said this week that Saudi Arabia lobbied heavily against the Western resolution.

The kingdom is not a voting member of the U.N. Human Rights Council and its delegation did not respond to Reuters’ requests for comment.

During the debate, Bahraini ambassador Yusuf Abdulkarim Bucheeri said that the international group of investigators had “contributed to spreading misinformation about the situation on the ground” in Yemen.

In the vote called by Saudi ally Bahrain, 21 countries voted against the Dutch resolution including China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia, Venezuela and Uzbekistan. Eighteen including Britain, France and Germany voted to support it.

There were seven abstentions and Ukraine’s delegation was absent. The United States only has observer status.

Radhya Almutawakel, chairperson of the independent Yemeni activist group Mwatana for Human Rights, said she was deeply disappointed by the result.

“By voting against the renewal of the GEE today, UN member states have given a green light to warring parties to continue their campaign of death and destruction in Yemen,” she said, referring to the investigators known as the Group of Eminent Experts.

John Fisher of Human Rights Watch said that the failure to renew the mandate was “a stain on the record of the Human Rights Council”.

“By voting against this much-needed mandate, many states have turned their back on victims, bowed to pressure from the Saudi-led coalition, and put politics before principle,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Michelle Nichols in New York and Ghaida Ghantous in Dubai; Editing by Alex Richardson, Andrew Heavens and Sonya Hepinstall)

Source Link U.N. ends Yemen war crimes probe in defeat for Western states

David Barret
David Barret

Related posts:

  1. Wall Street’s subdued finish fails to detract from strong August (Aug 31)
  2. Facebook explains content it demotes in news feed in bid for transparency
  3. Singing and dancing as South Africa’s national airline returns to the skies
  4. New European taskforce takes on Mali’s elusive militants

Filed Under: News

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

  • Reindeer Bring A Gift Greater Than Any Of Santa’s – Hope Of A Stable Climate
  • If Deep-Sea Pressure Can Crush A Human Body, How Do Deep-Sea Creatures Not Implode?
  • Meet Ned: The Lonely Lefty Snail Looking For Love
  • “America Will Lead The Next Giant Leap”: NASA Announces New Milestone In Hunt For Exoplanets
  • What Did Neanderthals Sound Like?
  • One Star System Could Soon Dazzle Us Twice With Nova And Supernova Explosions
  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version