UN will investigate Russia’s human rights violations during the invasion of Ukraine

The UN Human Rights Council today approved a resolutionAn independent commission of three experts will be created to investigate the human rights violations perpetrated by Russia in its aggression against Ukraine, which according to Kiev constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The resolution of the Council, made up of 47 countries, was approved with 32 votes in favor, 13 abstentions (including those of China, Cuba and Venezuela) and only two votes against (Russia itself and Eritrea).

In the debate prior to the vote, which began on Thursday, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet,singled out Russia for attacking civilian targets, including schools, hospitals and residential areas,and cause an exodus of more than two million internally displaced persons and refugees.

One of the cities where it happened is Kharkiv, whose civil administrative center was bombed and the building was destroyed, killing several employees and injuring dozens.

The city is still besieged by Russian forces and the bombings took place without the Russian objectives being clear. While the Kremlin defines the operations as “military”, the buildings destroyed are in many cases residential, in others they are educational or sports centers or even schools.

The meeting held this Thursday in Belarus agreed to create a humanitarian corridor for civilians and impose a “temporary ceasefire” for this, but a few hours later an attack on the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant caused a fire that had the world in suspense due to fear to a radioactive release that, according to the Ukrainian authorities, could have been several times worse than that of Chernobyl.

The firefighters, who had initially been blocked by the invading Russian forces that occupied the plant, were finally able to enter and control the fire, allaying fears of a deadly contamination that would have affected Russia itself: at the time, the winds were blowing towards the east, where large Russian cities, such as Krasnodar, are located.

“We know who the war criminals are and who their supreme boss is,” said Ukraine’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Eugenia Filipenko, when presenting the resolution, stressing that holding accountable those responsible for abuses “is the only way to ensure that it is not repeated anywhere in the world”.

The three experts in charge of the investigation will be appointed by the president of the Council (currently the Argentine ambassador to the UN in Geneva, Federico Villegas) and will report on the first results of their investigation at the 51st session of this body, scheduled for last third of this year.

One of the commission’s missions will be to “identify as far as possible which individuals or entities have been responsible for violations of human rights abuses” in Ukraine, in order to ensure that they are held accountable.

Their investigations will be based on interviews, testimonies of victims, forensic materials and others , according to the text of the approved resolution.

It also condemns “in the strongest possible terms” the human rights violations committed by Russia in its aggression against Ukraine and calls for “a rapid and verifiable withdrawal of Russian troops throughout the territory of Ukraine”, including its territorial waters.

It also calls for unhindered access to Ukraine for humanitarian agencies.