State Department: "Spotlight is on Maduro"

Venezuela"s abusive regime is unfit to serve on the UN Human Rights Council (HRC), and the member states should defeat its candidacy, a top State Department official stated on Friday, Oct 11.

Next week the UN General Assembly will elect 14 new members of the 47-country HRC beginning in January 2020. Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro government has also put forward its candidacy for a three-year term, a move that Washington considers as "ironic".

"The Maduro regime continues to commit egregious human rights violations against its own people. What it"s essentially doing is denying and depriving them of their fundamental freedoms through a policy of systemic torture, extrajudicial killings, repression, and intimidation," Roger Carstens, deputy assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, told reporters at Washington Foreign Press Center.

Some 55 countries currently recognize Juan Guaido as the rightful interim president of Venezuela. A recent UN report by Michelle Bachelet, the organization's high commissioner for human rights, chronicled cases of torture, sexual abuse and extrajudicial killings in the country.

If Maduro government succeeds in gaining a seat on the HRC, Carstens said, it would "kind of pull down the credibility and integrity of the HRC", and it might give the Venezuelan regime a chance to shield itself from UN investigative efforts.

Maduro is also expected to visit Baku later this month to attend the upcoming Non-Aligned Movement summit.

Asked whether Azerbaijan might receive negative U.S. attention by hosting a U.S.-sanctioned dictator, Carstens told TURAN's Washington correspondent that," we want, of course, to let people know that the spotlight is on Maduro and the relationships that he"s trying to establish, and sometimes there are consequences for those relationships." adding however, Baku's accepting Maduro "is nothing like, say, the support that Cuba is now giving to Venezuela, or Russia or China are trying to give Maduro."

What do the NAM members, as well as the people of Azerbaijan, need to know about Maduro before rolling out the red carpet for him?

Answering to this question, Carstens said "there are so many different reports and so many different information streams about what"s happening there that are bad, that impact negatively on the Venezuelan people and show Maduro for what he is".

"But truly, right now the gold standard is the Michelle Bachelet report that came out from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights. It came out on the 4th of July. And if there"s a simple read that anyone would want to get to have a sense of who Maduro is and what he"s doing, I would direct them there," he added.

Alex Raufoglu

Washington D.C.