A total of 54 countries, mostly Western states, have rejected a Russia-initiated resolution condemning Nazism in a vote at the UN on Monday.
The US, Canada, Germany, France, Australia, Austria, Greece, Italy, Poland, Finland, the Czech Republic and Ukraine were among the nations that rejected the motion.
However, their opposition did not prevent the Third Committee of the General Assembly from accepting the resolution, titled “Combating the Glorification of Nazism, Neo-Nazism, and Other Practices That Contribute to Fueling Contemporary Forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.”
The document was supported by 116 countries, including Azerbaijan, Algeria, Armenia, Belarus, Bolivia, Brazil, China, Cuba, Serbia and Syria. Another 11 UN members abstained.
The victory over Nazism, achieved in the Second World War between 1939 and 1945, “cannot be revised,”Grigory Lukyantsev, the head of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department for Multilateral Cooperation on Human Rights, said before the vote.
"The adoption of this resolution is our duty before those who gave their lives for the sake of peace on Earth, for the triumph of humanity and humanism. Any other stance would be nothing but cynicism and heresy towards those who liberated the world from the horrors of National Socialism,” Lukyantsev insisted.
Russia has put forward the resolution annually since 2005. Last year, it was backed by 112 states, with 50 voting against, and 14 others abstaining.
The co-authors of its current draft included Algeria, Venezuela, China, North Korea, Pakistan, Cuba, South Africa and dozens of other countries.
The 74-paragraph document rejects the glorification and propaganda of Nazism, welcomes efforts to preserve historical truth, calls for measures against the denial of crimes against humanity and to prevent the rewriting of history when it comes to the Second World War.
The resolution also “strongly condemns the use in educational settings of educational material and rhetoric that promulgate racism, discrimination, hatred and violence on the basis of ethnic origin, nationality, religion or belief.”