Diplomats from dozens of countries staged a walk out on Tuesday during Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov’s addresses at the Human Rights Council and the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva in protest against Moscow’s attacks on Ukraine.
Representatives from European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States were among those that left the room during Lavrov’s speech, which was delivered by video message after he was unable to travel to Geneva.
“We cannot be expected to sit by while Russia is actively spreading disinformation and falsehoods regarding its aggression against,” the EU Mission in Geneva said in a post on Twitter.
Earlier, ambassadors had similarly staged a walk out of the Conference on Disarmament, assembling outside the room with Ukraine’s ambassador Yevheniia Filipenko and a Ukrainian flag.
Lavrov was forced to cancel his trip due to a ban on Russian flights by EU countries, Russia’s Geneva mission said yesterday.
In his speech to the forum, Lavrov denounced the bans as “outrageous measures” and a breach of the right to freedom of movement.
“Members of the European Union have chosen the path of unilateral illegitimate sanctions, using them to evade the direct honest face-to-face dialogue that they clearly fear,” he told council members.
A spokesperson for the UN Information Service in Geneva told journalists earlier on Tuesday that the secretary general’s office in had reached out to European authorities at the request of the Russian mission in New York to try and help with the flight to attend the Council, stressing that was ultimately the responsibility of countries, not the UN.
Lavrov went on to address a long list of grievances against the Ukraine government, accusing the US and its allies of double standards on human rights and of continuing to “aggressively impose the so-called ‘rule-based world order”.
