Top UN official urges Venezuela to reconsider withdrawal from human rights convention
Baku, September 12 (AZERTAC). A United Nations senior official today urged Venezuela to reconsider its decision to withdraw from the American Convention of Human rights, warning that doing so would represent a serious setback for human rights protection in the Latin American country and the region as a whole.
According to a news release from the Organization of American States (OAS) on Monday, the Venezuelan Government informed the OAS` Secretary General of its move through an official letter, in which it also denounced the Convention.
The American Convention on Human Rights - also known as the Pact of San José - was adopted by many American countries in the Costa Rican capital of San José in 1969, and came into force in 1978.
It defines the human rights which the ratifying States have agreed to respect and ensure, and it created two organs to promote the observance and protection of human rights and take responsibility for overseeing compliance with the Convention: the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, which are both OAS organs.
The High Commissioner called on all countries in the Americas region to continue to cooperate with regional and international human rights mechanisms, and to refrain from taking any steps to weaken the regional human rights protection mechanisms.
To this date, excluding Venezuela, twenty-four nations in the Americas have ratified or have adopted the Convention: Argentina, Barbados, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, Dominica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Granada, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Dominican Republic, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and Uruguay.
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