Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan in a joint statement at the 58th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva condemned attempts to glorify the Nazis and their accomplices on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II, which became the bloodiest in the history of humanity.
"We consider the desire to glorify the Nazis and their accomplices to be absolutely unacceptable," says the text of the statement, read out by the representative of the Russian delegation Yevgeny Ustinov. "We remind you that the actions of the main Nazi criminals, who bear full responsibility for the outbreak and conduct of World War II, were recognized as criminal by the verdict of the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg. It confirmed the facts of the expulsion and extermination of the civilian population by the Nazis and their accomplices. All these monstrous crimes must be regarded as genocide of the peoples of the Soviet Union."
The countries also called any attempts to place equal responsibility for the outbreak of World War II on the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany "immoral and blasphemous in relation to the memory of tens of millions of those who died to liberate the world from the horrors of National Socialism."
"Our sacred duty is to preserve the truth about the common Victory over Nazism, to prevent a relapse of the ideology of hatred, discrimination on ethnic, racial or religious grounds and other inhumane acts," the joint statement concluded.
