Britain stopped the United Nations Security Council’s (UNSC) webcast of the meeting on Ukraine, which was supposed to take place on Wednesday in which Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, whom the International Criminal Court wants to detain for alleged war crimes, was due to speak.
According to Russia’s announcement on Tuesday, the meeting’s main topic was “evacuating children from conflict zones.” Maria Lvova-Belova, the commissioner, was to participate virtually. These meetings are not conducted in the Security Council chamber, and all 15 council members must consent for the United Nations to webcast them.
Vladimir Putin and Lvova-Belova are the targets of an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court in The Hague last month for allegedly illegally deporting minors from Ukraine and bringing people from Ukraine into Russia.
A spokesperson for the British UN mission in New York issued a statement saying, “She should not be afforded a UN platform to spread disinformation. If she wants to give an account of her actions, she can do so in The Hague.”
Russia hasn’t tried to hide the existence of a programme that it has used to import thousands of Ukrainian children, but it prefers to portray it as a charitable effort to help orphans and abandoned children in conflict areas.
Russia will from now on block UN webcasts of all similar meetings citing ‘UK censorship clause’,” according to Dmitry Polyanskiy, the country’s deputy ambassador to the UN.
The informal Security Council meeting scheduled for this Wednesday was planned long before the ICC’s announcement, according to Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s UN ambassador, and it was not meant to refute the accusations made against Putin and Lvova-Belova.
It is uncommon for a UN webcast to be stopped, according to diplomats. However, China last month prevented the United Nations from broadcasting an informal Security Council conference on North Korea’s human rights violations that the United States had called.
