Kidnapping Venezuelan president, wife ‘gross violation’ of int’l law: Iranian envoy
US critics, allies condemn Maduro’s abduction at UNSC
Iranian Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the UN Amir Saeid Iravani said on Monday that the kidnapping of Venezuelan president and his wife by the US is a gross violation of international law and is considered a serious attack on the principle of sovereign equality of states.
Addressing an emergency meeting of the UN Security Council regarding the US actions in Venezuela, Iravani said the Islamic Republic condemns in the strongest possible terms the military attack carried out by the US against Venezuela.
He called the US military aggression as an illegal act against an independent member state of the United Nations, which “establishes a serious breach of regional and international peace and security, with far-reaching consequences for the international system as a whole.”
Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife were kidnapped from their home in the country’s capital, Caracas, by US Special Forces early on Saturday morning. The two were then flown to New York, where they're currently being held on charges of narco-terrorism.
The Iranian diplomat said the abduction of the Venezuela’s “democratically elected president” and his wife by the US constitutes a flagrant violation of customary international law, including the principles of the inviolability of the immunities accorded to Heads of State and Government under international law, and represents a grave assault on the sovereign equality of States.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran recalls Venezuela’s inherent right to self-defense and underscores the legal responsibility of the United Nations, in particular the Security Council, to take immediate measures to halt this unlawful aggression and to ensure accountability for all those responsible.”
Iravani added that Washington is openly seeking to substitute its domestic law for international law and the Charter of the United Nations.
Venezuela attack slammed at UNSC
Members of the UN Security Council, including key US allies, also warned that the abduction of Venezuelan president and his wife could be a precedent-setting event for international law.
Venezuela’s ambassador to the UN, Samuel Moncada, condemned the US operation as “an illegitimate armed attack lacking any legal justification”, in remarks echoed by Cuba, Colombia and permanent UNSC members Russia and China.
“[The US] imposes the application of its laws outside its own territory and far from its coasts, where it has no jurisdiction, using assaults and the appropriation of assets,” Cuba’s ambassador, Ernesto Soberon Guzman, said, adding that such measures negatively affected Cuba.
Russia’s ambassador, Vassily Nebenzia, said the US cannot “proclaim itself as some kind of a supreme judge, which alone bears the right to invade any country, to label culprits, to hand down and to enforce punishments irrespective of notions of international law, sovereignty and non-intervention.”
Notable critics at the emergency session included traditional US allies, Mexico and Denmark, both of whom Trump has separately threatened with military action over the past year.
Inviolability of borders
Denmark, a longstanding US security ally, said that “no state should seek to influence political outcomes in Venezuela through the use of threat of force or through other means inconsistent with international law.”
“The inviolability of borders is not up for negotiation,” Denmark’s ambassador, Christina Markus Lassen, told the council in an oblique reference to Trump’s threat that the US would annex Greenland, a self-governed Danish territory.
France, another permanent member of the UNSC, also criticized the US. “The military operation that has led to the capture of Maduro runs counter to the principle of peaceful dispute resolution and runs counter to the principle of non-use of force,” said the French deputy ambassador, Jay Dharmadhikari.