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Andrew Korybko
Portions of the UN’s forthcoming human rights report on Crimea, have been leaked to Foreign Policy magazine and its findings are far from objective.
Indicating yet another instance of institutional bias against the Russian Federation and its interests, Ivan Simonovic, the UN’s Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights, has filled the so-called report with bias, misleading reporting, important omissions, one-sided analysis, and in some cases, outright false statements. Considering his history of “biased, prejudiced and non-objective assessment”, this should not come as a surprise, but it is surprising that such opinions are institutionalised into a nominally neutral organisation’s reporting.

A brief overview of the leaked document will prove that certain UN “representatives” are more emblematic of NATO’s information objectives than they are of objectivity.
Foreign Policy’s exclusive report on the document begins by addressing supposed Russian “propaganda” activities in the run-up to the referendum.

Through selective omission, it neglects to mention that Russia has the international right to broadcast its media to Ukraine, and when Crimea was part of that country, it was no exception.

It may be that Simonovic has taken to the trend of calling any media coming from Russia “propaganda” because Russia’s “chief propagandist”, Dmitry Kiselyov, has been the first journalist to ever be sanctioned by the EU as punishment for exercising his right to free speech. The report conveniently forgets to mention that Ukraine has banned select Russian media from broadcasting into the country, a move that set a precedent for Lithuania and Latvia’s later censorships.

The report then brazenly alleges that anti-reunification activists were “threatened, detained, and tortured”. Interestingly, this explosive claim has received scant, if any, mainstream exposure in Western media in the past.

Had there been seriously believable grounds for this to have occurred, the US and Western media machines would have milked the false narrative as much as they could as soon as the allegations emerged.

It is not improbable to imagine CNN dedicating a whole hour towards “investigating” this topic. Because none of this occurred and there is no substantial evidence besides heresy to corroborate this, it is very unprofessional for a UN official of all people to place such rumours into an official report.

Ludicrously, the document continues on to allege that “The presence of paramilitary and so called self-defence groups as well as soldiers in uniform without insignia, widely believed to be from the Russian Federation, was not conducive to an environment in which voters could freely exercise their right to hold opinions and the right to freedom of expression”.

It then has the audacity to state that “it is widely assessed that Russian speakers have not been subject to threats in Crimea.” It smoothly glosses over the fact violent neo-Nazi groups are a serious threat to minorities in Ukraine, and that Pravy Sector has directly threatened the East and Crimea in the past, areas where the Russian minority predominantly resides.

Amazingly, the report only tangentially mentions the infamous sniper shootings that came to define the climax of EuroMaidan, using a combination of inference and “hint-hint” to draw readers to the conclusion that it was Berkut that shot the rioters and their own men, not mercenaries under the employ of the West and the EuroMaidan’s leaders, as had later been revealed.

Russian Ambassador to the UN Vitaly Churkin also brought this up before the UN General Assembly, and the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs has demanded an unbiased investigation into what really happened. This critical omission would be journalistic negligence by any media corporation, but having it in an official UN document, along with all of the other false and misleading “findings”, is purposeful propaganda aimed against the Russian Federation.

The UN is not supposed to be a propaganda outlet for anyone, owing to its supposedly neutral status as an objective entity.
Andrew Korybko is an American Master’s Degree student at the Moscow State University of International Relations.— Global Research.