Two oral interventions (pre-recorded) for the inter-active dialogue on Venezuela on 10 March, on behalf of the International Human Rights Association of American Minorities

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN MINORITIES

ITEM 4, INTER-ACTIVE DIALOGUE 10 MARCH 2021-

TO HIGH COMMISSIONER ORAL UPDATE

INTERVENTION BY PROFESSOR ALFRED DE ZAYAS, IHRAAM DELEGATE

Distinguished President, Delegates  — 

IHRAAM welcomes the oral update of High Commissioner Bachelet on progress achieved in Venezuela. IHRAAM recalls the pragmatic recommendations of the Independent Expert on International Order, who concretely proposed the opening of an OHCHR office in Caracas so as to facilitate advisory services and technical assistance and coordinate UN monitoring. His September 2018 report to the Council acknowledged the cooperation of Venezuelan authorities who implemented many of his recommendations including the release of detainees.

IHRAAM concurs with the preliminary findings of the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, Professor Alena Douhan on her recent mission to Venezuela. Her diagnosis is correct. Her recommendations are urgent, because economic sanctions kill. This was the opinion of the late Idriss Jazairy and several other rapporteurs.

If responsibility to protect means anything, it means that the international community must protect the Venezuelan people from sanctions that hinder Venezuela in obtaining food and medicines, maintaining infrastructures, modernizing hospitals, electrical plants and other utilities, and impede financial transactions. Also the freezing of Venezuelan assets by governments and banks in the US, UK, Portugal etc. add to the misery. In 2019 a report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), co-authored by Jeffrey Sachs and Mark Weisbrot, concluded that sanctions had caused the deaths of over 40,000 Venezuelans in 2018 alone.

Because sanctions kill, this Council must unequivocally condemn them.

INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION OF AMERICAN MINORITIES  –  10 MARCH 2021

INTERACTIVE DIALOGUE – ITEM 4 – TO FACT-FINDING MISSION

INTERVENTION BY PROFESSOR ALFRED DE ZAYAS, IHRAAM DELEGATE

distinguished President, Delegates  —

IHRAAM  cannot endorse the report of the fact-finding mission because of its methodological flaws.
IHRAAM endorses the preliminary conclusions of the Special Rapporteur on Unilateral Coercive Measures, who has just returned from a two-week mission to Venezuela. IHRAAM also endorses the report of the first Independent Expert on International Order, presented to this Council in September 2018. Both rapporteurs engaged with a large number of stakeholders on the ground, opposition, chamber of commerce, diplomats, professors, students, churches, economists, non-governmental organizations and civil society as well as government officials. They made pragmatic and implementable recommendations.

IHRAAM calls for direct dialogue between the government and the opposition, as that hosted by former Spanish prime minister Rodriguez Zapatero and more recently by Mexican president Lopez Obrador.

What the Venezuelan people urgently need is international solidarity.  IHRAAM knows that there are multiple causes for the Venezuelan crisis, but the most important is the economic war which has been waged against Venezuela not just since 2015 but already since 1999, according to the same playbook used against Salvador Allende in Chile, when Nixon ordered Kissinger to “make the Chilean economy scream”.  The combination of the dramatic fall in the price of oil together with the draconian sanctions and financial blockade have led directly to the death of tens of thousands of Venezuelans.

IHRAAM  calls upon this Council to demand the lifting of the killer-sanctions.