GENEVA: The Chief of United Nations human rights Navi Pillay said on Monday that UN Security Council (UNSC) has faced the failure with regard to bring the unabated wave of violence and conflict that have completely destabilized Syria to an end.
War crimes carried out by both government forces and rebels in Syria were escalating amid an increasingly radicalised and sectarian conflict, a UN commission of inquiry found in its latest report published earlier this month.
Over 70, 000 people have been killed in the two years since President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown started on anti-regime protesters, the UN estimates.
“The Security Council has so far failed with regard to Syria,” Navi Pillay told ministers as the 22nd session of the UN Human Rights Council kicked off in Geneva.
Joining Pilly in lashing out the international community’s inaction on Syria, the president of the UN General Assembly Vuk Vuk Jeremic said “For close to two years, the international community has failed to put a stop to the carnage.”
“The immediate cessation of hostilities should be our foremost priority.”
The UN human rights chief said that the Security Council had repeatedly been asked by her office to take the issue of Syrian conflict into the International Criminal Court (ICC) in the Hague but it didn’t work out.
“Two important situations, Darfur in 2008 and Libya in 2011, have been referred” by the Security Council,” Pillay said, but it had not done the same for Syria, “despite the repeated reports of widespread or systematic crimes and violations by my office,” and a wide range of other sources, she said.
DND
