MAXIM RYZHENKOV, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Belarus, said that the Charter of the UN “is not perfect — just like we are not perfect.  But it’s the best we have”.  The establishment of the Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter was due to a number of countries not abiding by the norms enshrined in the Charter.  The West’s main interest is to maintain their dominance and the prosperity of their elites by exploiting other nations and their resources, while employing the principle of “divide and conquer”.  But if a State dares to enact their own policy to protect their people and tries to throw off the yoke of external control over their resources, the West subject them to sanctions and pressure.  Today, about 40 countries with a population of 2.5 billion are under illegal restrictive measures imposed by the United States and the European Union, he observed.

From the point of view of the “collective West”, 72 per cent of people live in what the West calls “autocracies”, while 20 years ago this figure stood at 46 per cent, he noted, adding:  “Free countries in the Global South” — who do not accept sanctions — experience the “democratization” forced upon them.  Spotlighting a “new majority” where new ideas and new projects are springing up — strictly peaceful — he highlighted the Belt and Road Initiative and the initiative of the Russian Federation and Belarus to draft a Eurasian Charter of Multipolarity and Diversity in the twenty-first century, geared towards establishing a unified international community in which the fate of all the people is united.  “If we placed more trust in the UN, most peace-loving initiatives would be born and would grow within the Organization, not outside it,” he said.

Noting that the UN should throw off the dictate of a number of States that are feeling “exceptional”, he stressed:  “The UN is all of us.”  He recalled that, in 2023, the Western countries waged a “dirty campaign” to prevent Belarus from being elected to serve on the Security Council and underscored the need for fair Council reform.  “The voice of the Global South on the Security Council is our voice,” he added, stressing that the UN should be a voice of States without it being diluted by non-Government bodies.  Also reporting that his country’s president, Aleksandr Lukashenko, put forward an initiative of a Global Dialogue on Security, he stated:  “We must breathe the spirit of San Francisco into the UN’s lungs.  That is the spirit that gave life to our Organization.”