(18 September 2014)
Mr. President,
As original sponsor of the initiative on the role of prevention in the promotion and protection of human rights that, through effective teamwork of cross-regional core group of main co-sponsors encompassing also Hungary, Maldives, Morocco, Poland, and Uruguay, embodied in the Council’s resolution 24/16 which decided to convey today’s panel, Ukraine commends the opportunity to substantively discuss the issue of prevention.
We would also like to express our deep appreciation to the distinguished panelists for their interventions helping to better understand multifaceted and multidimensional nature of the phenomenon of prevention of human rights violations, thus raising awareness of it and contributing to the development of its concept.
Although there are examples of implementing preventive strategies in the field of human rights, by and large, they receive insufficient attention and should be given greater prominence in policies and strategies of early warning and preventive action.
Besides, we hope that deeper elaboration of prevention in human rights dimension will enhance conflict prevention mechanisms of the UN. Especially it could be highly instrumental in averting misuse of biased and framed allegations of human rights violations, in particular in the field of ethnic and national minorities’ rights, as a sufficient pretext for illegal military intervention, that Ukraine is subjected since last March up to these days.
In this regard, the role of the Human Rights Council – de facto one of the principal bodies of the UN in preventing human rights violations, could not be neither overestimated nor omitted.
To this end, my delegation would like to ask esteemed panelists on how, in their views, the Council could better contribute, in addition to steps envisaged by its resolution 24/16 (panel discussion – drafting a study on prevention – preparation of a practical toolkit to support states and other stakeholders in the practical application of prevention), to sooner development of the “prevention” concept and its further practical implementation in relevant policies on national, regional and international levels.
I thank you.