The United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) has voted to suspend Russia from the organisation’s leading human rights body amid allegations that its soldiers killed civilians while retreating from the region around Ukraine’s capital.
The United States-initiated resolution on Thursday achieved the two-thirds majority of UNGA voting members required to pass, with 93 votes cast in favour and 24 against. Fifty-eight countries abstained, but their votes did not count towards the final tally.
Pakistan and India were among the 58 countries that abstained.
Other South Asian nations — Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and Sri Lanka — also abstained, although the Biden administration had sent its senior envoys to these countries before the vote to persuade them to support the move.
India participated in the debate, acknowledging that the “human rights situation in Ukraine has deteriorated,” but decided not to vote. Pakistan did not participate in the debate.
In the Middle East, Iran voted against the resolution while Saudi Arabia abstained, reflecting recent tensions in its ties with Washington. Egypt, Iraq, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates also abstained.
The brief resolution expressed “grave concern at the ongoing human rights and humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, particularly at the reports of violations and abuses of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law by the Russian Federation, including gross and systematic violations and abuses of human rights”.
The vote, which makes Moscow the first permanent member of the UN Security Council to ever have its membership revoked from any United Nations body, was immediately welcomed by Kyiv but criticised by Moscow.
“War criminals have no place in UN bodies aimed at protecting human rights. Grateful to all member states which supported the relevant UNGA resolution and chose the right side of history,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said on Twitter.
For his part, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov expressed regret about the decision. “We’re sorry about that,” Peskov said in an interview with Britain’s Sky News. “And we’ll continue to defend our interests using every possible legal means,” he said.
Russia had called on an unspecified number of countries to vote “no”, saying an abstention or not voting would be considered an unfriendly act and would affect bilateral relations.
In its so-called “non-paper” obtained by The Associated Press news agency, Russia said the attempt to expel it from the Human Rights Council is a political act by countries that want to preserve their dominant position and control over the world.
That was echoed by Gennady Kuzmin, Russia’s deputy ambassador to the UN, who told a special UNGA session on Ukraine before Thursday’s vote that the US-led resolution “has nothing to do with the human rights situation on the ground”.
“What we see is an attempt by the US to maintain its dominant position and total control, to continue its attempt at human rights colonialism,” Kuzmin said.
But Ukraine’s UN ambassador, Sergiy Kyslytsya, had urged UNGA members to “press the ‘yes’ button and to save the Human Rights Council and many lives around the world and in Ukraine”.
“On the other hand, pressing ‘no’ means pulling a trigger and means a red dot on the screen – red as the blood of the innocent lives lost,” he said.
US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield made the call for Russia to be stripped of its seat on the 47-member Human Rights Council earlier this week, following videos and photos of streets in the town of Bucha strewn with corpses of what appeared to be civilians.
“We believe that the members of the Russian forces committed war crimes in Ukraine, and we believe that Russia needs to be held accountable,” Thomas-Greenfield said on Monday. “We cannot let a member state that is subverting every principle we hold dear to continue to sit on the UN Human Rights Council.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken welcomed the UNGA vote on Thursday. “A country that’s perpetrating gross and systematic violations of human rights should not sit on a body whose job it is to protect those rights,” he told reporters.
The images emerging from the Kyiv region after Russia’s withdrawal have sparked global revulsion and calls for tougher sanctions.
Moscow has denied its troops were responsible for civilian deaths. Russia’s ambassador in Geneva, Gennady Gatilov, called the US action “unfounded and purely emotional bravado that looks good on camera – just how the US likes it”.
“Washington exploits the Ukrainian crisis for its own benefit in an attempt either to exclude or suspend Russia from international organisations,” Gatilov said, in comments relayed by a Russian diplomatic mission spokesman.
