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UN rights chief agrees to meet Venezuela foreign minister
GENEVA, Sept 10, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – New UN rights chief Michelle Bachelet
has agreed to meet Venezuela’s foreign minister, who is due to address the
top UN rights body in Geneva this week, her office said Monday.
“I can confirm that Venezuela requested a meeting and the High Commissioner
will be meeting with the Minister of Foreign Affairs” Jorge Arreaza, UN
rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told AFP in an email.
She did not say when the meeting would take place, but Arreaza is to
address the UN Human Rights Council on Tuesday.
Bachelet mentioned Venezuela in her first speech as head of the UN rights
office on Monday, listing it among a long line of states with human rights
situations she was concerned about.
In a written version of the speech, the former Chilean president decried
the “serious human rights violations” documented in recent reports on
Venezuela.
Thousands of Venezuelans have been fleeing a spiralling economic and
political crisis, as the country run by President Nicolas Maduro suffers a
fourth year of recession.
According to the UN, some 1.6 million people have fled Venezuela since
2015.
Bachelet pointed out that the exodus was “due largely to lack of food or
access to critical medicines and health care, insecurity and political
persecution”.
“This movement is accelerating,” she said, warning that “cross-border
movement of this magnitude is unprecedented in the recent history of the
Americas.”
A report released by the UN rights office in June highlighted alleged
extra-judicial killings by security officers during a crackdown on protests.
It suggested that those officers, who had supposedly been tasked with
fighting crime, may have been responsible for more than 500 killings between
July 2015 and March 2017, largely carried out in poor neighbourhoods.
Bachelet said that since the release of the report, her office had
continued to receive “information on violations of social and economic
rights, such as cases of deaths related to malnutrition or preventable
diseases, as well as violations of civil and political rights.”
She lamented that “the government has not shown openness for genuine
accountability measures”.
BSS/AFP/MRI/1553 HRS