Statement by Permanent Representative Vassily Nebenzia raising a point of order at UN Security Council meeting on humanitarian situation in Ukraine
Mme.President,
Before we adopt the agenda for this meeting, I would like to voice our protest with regard to how the British Presidency treated two our requests for a Security Council meeting to discuss heinous provocation of Ukrainian radicals in Bucha. First on Sunday, 3 April, we requested a regular session to convene at 03.00 pm on Monday. After you rejected this request, we called for an emergency meeting at 12.00 pm on 4 April. You saw it possible to grossly violate the Council’s rules of procedure and ignore our request again, having made an authoritarian unconcerted decision to have this topic discussed today. I elaborated on this outrageous situation in my yesterday’s letter addressed to the Presidency that we also circulated as an official UNSC document.
Let me ask you on what grounds do you believe you can act like this, defying all norms and rules? Aren’t you aware that in case you disagreed with our proposal, you should have called a meeting and put the question whether to hold the meeting that we requested to a procedural vote? Besides, you have the example of our UNSC Presidency, during which we did not reject the convening of any of the six meetings on Ukraine.
We therefore demand a clarification and guarantees that in future you will not contest the right of UNSC members to request Council meetings, as envisaged in Rule 2 of the Council’s rules of procedure. It goes as follows: “The President shall call a meeting of the Security Council at the request of any member of the Security Council”.
Right of reply:
We do have factual evidence that we requested a meeting 24 hours well in advance. All of this has been put on record, so we are ready to share it. I do hope that what you just said means that henceforth you will not refuse to convene UNSC meetings, requested by member states.
