BRIC to offer UN resolution against unilateral sanctions-Brazil FM.

22/9 Tass 76

UNITED NATIONS, September 22 (Itar-Tass) - The BRIC group (Brazil,
Russia, India and China) intends to put forward for discussion of the new
session of the UN General Assembly a draft resolution denouncing states
that introduce unilateral sanctions without the approval of the UN
Security Council, Brazilian Foreign Minister Selso Amorim said at the UN
on Tuesday.
"We are already engaged in the preparatory work on the General
Assembly's resolutions," he said. The resolution denouncing unilateral
sanctions, if approved, will call into question the legality of additional
sanctions that the United States and other Western countries introduced
against Iran for its nuclear programme.
"In some case we also oppose multilateral sanctions, and the more so
do not welcome unilateral sanctions, as they are introduced outside the UN
system," the Brazilian foreign minister said.
This June, the UN Security Council adopted a resolution approving the
introduction of additional sanctions against Iran. The delegations of
Brazil and Turkey were decisively opposed to that. During the document's
discussion officials of both countries said that they concluded with Iran
an agreement on the exchange of uranium and that there is no need to
toughen sanctions against Iran. However, the United States and their
Western partners insisted on toughening the sanction regime against Iran.
As a result, the document was approved at the UN Security Council by a
majority of votes, the Brazilian and Turkish delegations voted against,
and the Lebanese delegation abstained.
Resolutions of the UN General Assembly, unlike the Security Council
resolutions, have no force of international law and are not binding.
The BRIC countries met for their first official summit on 16 June
2009, in Yekaterinburg, Russia, with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Dmitry
Medvedev, Manmohan Singh, and Hu Jintao, the respective leaders of Brazil,
Russia, India and China, all attending. The general consensus is that the
BRIC term was first prominently used in a Goldman Sachs report from 2003,
which speculated that by 2050 these four economies would be wealthier than
most of the current major economic powers.
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