UN Third Committee Adopts Anti-Nazism Resolution 117 to 53, With Text Condemning Russia's Use of the Issue to Justify Invading Ukraine
The Third Committee of the UN General Assembly on November 10 adopted, by 117 votes to 53 with 9 abstentions, the draft resolution on combating the glorification of Nazism and neo-Nazism that Russia has submitted every year since 2005, this year with 45 co-sponsors. The text adopted was not Russia's original draft: before the vote, an amendment introduced by the United Kingdom on behalf of eight countries, including Ukraine, Albania, Australia, Japan, Liechtenstein, the Marshall Islands and Norway, was approved by 64 votes to 44 with 55 abstentions, inserting a paragraph expressing alarm at Russia's use of alleged neo-Nazism to justify its territorial aggression against Ukraine.
Russia then voted for the amended text but publicly disassociated itself from its fourth paragraph. Grigory Lukyantsev, director of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department for multilateral human rights cooperation, presented the 117-vote result as recognition of Russia's position by a 'global majority,' and accused Western countries of seeking Russia's diplomatic isolation at the cost of their own reputations and of trying to overturn the outcomes of the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials. Russia also singled out Germany, Italy and Japan, the former Axis states, for voting against.
In its explanation of vote, the United States Mission to the United Nations said the United States condemns and rejects Nazism in all its forms, but that the resolution has had politicized roots since it was first introduced in 2005 and that its recommendations limiting freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly contravene the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, so the United States again voted no. The 53 votes against also included Ukraine, Canada, Poland and Austria.
Adoption by the Third Committee is approval at committee level only; the draft still goes to the plenary of the General Assembly for consideration.
(Source: UN General Assembly Third Committee)
Source: UN General Assembly Third Committee
Published by GSM · USA (original Chinese edition)
Photo: 图：联合国大会会场资料图。照片：Mojnsen 摄，CC BY-SA 4.0，经 Wikimedia Commons。 / Photo: File photo of the United Nations General Assembly hall. Photo by Mojnsen, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
