Moscow’s veto power in the Security Council and the weakness of the legal arguments make the attempt unlikely to succeed.
Two deputies of the Ukrainian parliament, Dmytro Natalukha and Lesia Vasylenko, this week in London promoted the creation of an international alliance to suspend Russia’s presence in the United Nations (UN). It is the launch of a diplomatic campaign following the statement published in December by the Kyiv Foreign Ministry.
The UN General Assembly has already suspended the presence of the Russian delegation at the Human Rights Council in April 2022, but the expulsion of one of its members from the international organization is unprecedented. Apartheid South Africa was temporarily suspended in 1974 under the impetus of an alliance of African countries and despite opposition from the US, UK and other countries.
Ukraine’s argument is more like the one that led to the suspension of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in 1992, because the Assembly did not accept that the entity formed by Serbia and Montenegro inherited the status of the broken Yugoslav state. Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina had already been separated from the former country by armed conflict and Macedonia was peaceful.
Russia’s membership of the Security Council, which should accept the Assembly’s reference to a suspension proposal, suggests the Ukrainian initiative is doomed to block. The Russian government is the one that has exercised the most vetoes in the Security Council since the creation of the UN, using the right of its permanent members.
Kiev’s main argument – which also claims that Russia has invaded countries, is acting as a terrorist state and will destroy the UN system with its actions – is about the legality of its mere presence. Moscow is said to have failed to ratify the United Nations Charter, which sets out the goals and rules of the organization. And, as in the case of Yugoslavia, it would have illegally inherited the status of the Soviet Union.
The anomalies occurred from the creation of the UN. Ukraine and Belarus participated in the creation of the organization, although they were also part of another founding state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. During the messy dismantling of the Soviet Union, in 1991, the President of the Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, sent a letter to UN Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to inherit membership in the USSR. In his letter, Yeltsin explained that at the meeting of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) in Alma Atá, the eleven participating republics – including Ukraine – agreed that the Russian Federation would inherit the USSR’s position in the UN.
However, jurist Bohdan Ustymenko states in ‘informnapalm.org’ that the short-lived CIS had no legal authority to make such a decision.
The Ukrainian Foreign Ministry does not mention that decision in the statement with which it has now launched its campaign. It suggests that the UN Secretariat General’s legal adviser made a mistake and failed to follow the steps for access to the organization set out in the charter. But the veto power in the Security Council and the acceptance of Russia’s presence for three decades seem insurmountable obstacles for Kiev.
Brett Schaefer, a researcher with the Heritage Foundation study group, suggested in “defenseone.com” at the start of the invasion that the viable alternative to an eviction would be to mimic the license suspension, as was done at the time with the South African delegation to occupy their seats or to vote in the General Assembly. But countries that opposed that sanction in 1972 affirmed that it set a serious precedent and violated the UN’s founding charter.
Source: La Verdad
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