Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's remarks at the General Meeting of the Commission of the Russian Federation for UNESCO, Moscow, January 28, 2025
28 January 2025 14:43
102-28-01-2025
Good afternoon,
Happy New Year and Merry Christmas!
I wish all of us every success in 2025, as well as victories and all the very best.
Today, we are holding the General Meeting of the Commission of the Russian Federation for UNESCO. It is one of the first international events of this kind this year.
I am delighted to welcome all of you in this room. The year 2024 was quite challenging for our country, for the entire world and in terms of the way we work with international organisations, including UNESCO. Once again, we saw that there should be no illusions regarding the current situation within UNESCO, or the policy vector as set by its Director-General, Audrey Azoulay, and her closest associates. Having unleashed a hybrid war against our country, Western countries have been proactive in relying on the opportunities they can obtain through international secretariats by literally seeking to privatise them. UNESCO is not an exception in this regard. Attempts to exploit its agenda while pursuing vested political interests continue unabated despite the grave violations of the organisation's charter. There is also an obvious focus on injecting the Ukraine topic into the agenda of all the UNESCO structures. The UNESCO Executive Board has been guided by what we call double standards when taking its decisions on Crimea and Ukraine, while targeting Russia. There was a time when this organisation enjoyed universal acclaim and authority, but it is now reaching far beyond its mandate and competence when taking these decisions.
Headed by its Director-General, Audrey Azoulay, who is a French national, UNESCO Secretariat has been de facto catering to the interests of those who proclaimed that their objective consists of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia, and cancelling everything Russian, from Russia's involvement in international processes to culture, education and religious values. The Secretariat has been silent and opted for playing along with the Kiev regime and its Western backers. It has shamefully failed to speak up on the massive and system-wide effort to destroy Russian historical heritage sites in Ukraine and in the Baltic states, including those protected by UNESCO as cultural heritage sites. This situation is quite sad.
Together with her colleagues, Audrey Azoulay looked the other way when monuments to Catherine the Great and Prince Grigory Potemkin were destroyed in Odessa's historical neighbourhood. UNESCO listed this part of the city as a world heritage site just one week after this barbaric act took place, as if they created this delay intentionally in order to have an alibi. By the same token, they did not notice, as they claim, the destruction of a monument to Alexander Pushkin. It was erected in central Odessa back in 1889 and was funded by city dwellers. But they ignored all these developments. The same happened with Latvia, where authorities got rid of a monument to military commander Barclay de Tolly, a memorial plaque to Alexander Pushkin and Anna Kern's head statue in late 2024. UNESCO Secretariat has many other things on its conscience. Not only has it failed to live up to its mandate, but has been helping undermine the very concept of the cultural heritage of humankind in an extremely blatant and outrageous manner.
UNESCO remains blatantly inactive amid the ongoing persecution of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church, which is being forcibly expelled from the Kiev-Pechersk Lavra, a UNESCO World Heritage site. The organisation deliberately looks the other way while Ukraine and the Baltic states are ousting the Russian language entirely from education, the media, culture, science and everyday life. Not only are these countries flouting the rights of Russians and anyone else engaged with Russian culture - what they are doing actually challenges the first article of the UN Charter, which commands everyone to respect the rights of every human being regardless of their race, gender, language or religion, in a most blatant and brazen manner.
The UNESCO Secretariat is demonstrating a lack of scruples - to say the least - as well as utter incompetence in protecting freedom of speech and ensuring journalists' rights. Everyone knows about the recent scandal (1, 2, 3, 4) involving the UNESCO Secretariat's report on media workers who lost their lives in the line of duty. The report failed to mention several high-profile cases involving the murders of Russian journalists Darya Dugina, Oleg Klokov, Maxim Fomin, Rostislav Zhuravlev, Boris Maksudov, and many others. The Russian side had informed the Secretariat, in a timely manner, about each of those tragic incidents. However, all of our appeals were ignored. Ms Audrey Azoulay's disrespect for the mandate given to her in what regards the safety of journalists and her failure to condemn their murders makes her complicit in the information war against our country, or, possibly, a bigger war against the truth.
It is quite symptomatic that many countries of the Global Majority have similar reasons to be dissatisfied with the UNESCO Secretariat and Director-General Audrey Azoulay who have been neglecting their duty for years, hushing up cases that involved the respective countries, juggling facts and conniving with the propagation of falsehoods.
The Secretariat has distanced itself from France repeatedly reneging on its obligations as the host country of the UNESCO Headquarters, and is not reacting in any way to the artificial obstacles Paris creates to prevent Russian representatives from attending UNESCO events, such as denying them entry visas. I could go on forever citing the Secretariat officials' actions that violated the UNESCO Charter. And with all this, the Secretariat leadership still has the audacity to voice complaints and concerns about our recent public criticism of UNESCO and its Director-General.
They address us some written, totally ungrounded demarches. But despite everything, I am certain that we will not cease to expose the double standards and bias in the work of this organisation. We will continue to insist on the need for both the member states and the Secretariat to strictly comply with UNESCO's principles and ideals.
This "malady" is about catering to the interests of just one group of countries - the Western camp, in this case. It is not unique to UNESCO alone: its metastases can be discerned at other international bodies, including the UN Secretariat, where the effects of the Western policy to "privatise" its structures are felt quite distinctly.
Nevertheless, despite all the attempts I have mentioned, it is not possible to cancel Russia at UNESCO, nor ever will be. There is no doubt about that. In spite of all the intrigues and "spoke-putting," we achieved a number of positive results in several areas in 2024.
Specifically, we managed to have Russia's 33rd nomination placed on the UNESCO list of world natural and cultural sites at the World Heritage Committee's session in New Delhi in July 2024. I am referring to the Cultural Landscape of Kenozero Lake in the Arkhangelsk Region. I would like to thank Arkhangelsk Region Governor Alexander Tsybulsky, the Kenozero National Park, and the regional authorities for the work they have done, as well as the Likhachev Russian Research Institute ofr Cultural and Natural Heritage that renders the expert support for Russian bids.
I would like to commend in particular the contribution made by our ministries and agencies. The delegation of the Russian Ministry of Culture led by Olga Lyubimova was highly instrumental in drafting the UNESCO Framework on Culture and Arts Education, the centerpiece of the conference in Abu Dhabi in February 2024.
The Russian Federal Agency for Ethnic Affairs shared Russian advanced language policy know-how at a meeting of the Global Task Force for Making a Decade of Action for Indigenous Languages.
I would like to thank in particular Russian Minister of Sport Mikhail Degtyarev for his consistent effort to protect the rights of Russian athletes at UNESCO. I am confident that these efforts will yield positive results quite soon. The UNESCO Executive Board has extended the status of the International Competence Centre for Mining-Engineering Education (ICCMEE) as Category 2 Centre under the auspices of UNESCO. This centre is contributing greatly to strengthening our cooperation with UNESCO. Much credit in this regard goes to Vladimir Litvinenko, Chairman of the ICCMEE Governing Board and Rector of the St Petersburg Mining University.
In 2024, we commemorated the 70th anniversary of our country's accession to UNESCO. I would like to extend my gratitude to the TASS news agency for their productive collaboration in organising the photo exhibition that was showcased in Moscow and other capitals of UNESCO member states.
A particular note of thanks is due to the Kultura TV channel for their documentary film on the history of our collaboration with UNESCO, as well as to our longstanding partner, Marka, for issuing a commemorative stamp block dedicated to this anniversary.
We will persist in involving the Russian regions in engagements at the UNESCO platform when it aligns with our national interests. This is a beneficial practice. A product must be showcased to its full advantage. The regions of Russia embody its richness and diversity. In this context, significant work has been undertaken by the Republic of Altai, Bashkortostan, St Petersburg, Tatarstan, Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), and many others.
Last summer, with the support of the Russian Committee of the UNESCO Information for All Programme, two major international forums on multilingualism took place in St Petersburg and Khanty-Mansiysk, featuring experts from 40 countries. Under UNESCO's auspices, the international forum Child in a Digital World was held at Lomonosov Moscow State University in June 2024. In April 2024, an international conference with leading overseas experts was convened at the Yangan-Tau UNESCO Global Geopark in the Republic of Bashkortostan. Even in the realm of culture, it is virtually impossible to cancel Russia.
At the UNESCO headquarters, together with CIS delegations, we held, for the second time, celebratory events for the Russian Language Day in the summer of 2024. There, an exhibition entitled Splendour of Russia's Artistic Heritage was organised, featuring participation from the Higher School of Folk Arts from St Petersburg.
Our domestic experts have submitted numerous proposals during the drafting of the new Recommendation on the Ethics of Neurotechnology. They are directly involved in preparing a report on the implementation of the Recommendation on the Ethics of Artificial Intelligence. This matter must constantly remain under scrutiny. Daily news emerges about ground-breaking achievements in this field, including recent reports detailing how efficiently Chinese experts outperform their American counterparts with significantly fewer expenditures. We always advocate for fair competition, which should be evident across all spheres of life.
We will provide support to the Global Majority countries, including within the framework of UNESCO's Priority Africa. Towards this end, we have granted a voluntary contribution to finance African countries' projects under the International Programme for the Development of Communication. Russian fertiliser producer PhosAgro has provided the eighth series of grants to young talented chemical scientists, including in Africa and other Global South countries, within the Green Chemistry for Life project, which was launched jointly with UNESCO in cooperation with the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC).
UNESCO will mark its 80th anniversary in 2025. It is a good occasion for making an objective and comprehensive analysis of the situation in the organisation to see how well it is delivering on its mandate, where advice would be welcome, and where recommendations and competences underlying UNESCO's programmes based on the member states' decisions should be adjusted. We should look into what can be done to enhance the efficiency of efforts to ensure our interests at UNESCO.
The 43rd session of UNESCO's General Conference will be held in November 2025. We have supported the idea of our Uzbekistani friends to hold it in Samarkand. It will be the first time over the past 40 years that a session of the General Conference will take place outside the organisation's Paris headquarters. A Russian delegation will undoubtedly take an active part in preparing and holding that event. I would like to enlist your help and to instruct the Commission's Secretariat to coordinate preparations for the General Conference and to submit proposals regarding the format of a representative Russian delegation.
A new Director-General of UNESCO will be elected at the General Conference and the preceding session of the Executive Board.
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