MOSCOW, 28 January (BelTA) - The situation with human rights in the CIS should be assessed by the Commonwealth of Independent States itself, not by the West, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in an interview with Russian radio stations in Moscow on 28 January, BelTA has learned.
"When the CIS was established, its Charter had a provision on a human rights commission," Sergey Lavrov recalled. “Somehow things did not pan out as planned. At first the idea was to show that human rights were important to us. But over the past few years, we have been insisting on implementing this provision. There is a general agreement to launch such a commission. There is a common understanding that the situation with human rights in the CIS should be assessed by the CIS member states rather than some Western structures or organizations such as the European Court of Human Rights, which has long stopped, in my opinion, to rely on the principles of justice and which has stopped making unbiased decisions politicizing them more and more every year.”
The Russian foreign minister noted that all CIS countries concur with this idea. "We must more actively, more openly discuss human rights problems within the CIS," he stressed.
