The 15-member bloc met for an emergency meeting on Monday in New York City, where the Venezuelan pair were also due to face drug trafficking charges in a US federal court. Al Jazeera reported.
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.
Mexico’s ambassador, Hector Vasconcelos, said that the council had an “obligation to act decisively and without double standards” towards the US, and it was for “sovereign peoples to decide their destinies,” according to a UN readout.
