Almost 600 parliamentarians from 73 countries, including Spain, Colombia and Ecuador, urged their respective governments on Friday to pressure the United States to remove Cuba from its list of “state sponsors of terrorism.”
The general secretary of the Spanish party Podemos, Ione Belarra and the Colombian senator Clara López Obregón are among the signatories of a letter coordinated by the left-wing organization Progressive International, which describes this designation as “cruel, cynical and a clear violation of international law.”
The politicians are asking U.S. President Joe Biden to remove the island from the list, which also includes Syria, Iran and North Korea, as his colleague Barack Obama did in 2015, but which was later reversed in 2021 by Republican Donald Trump.
The inclusion in that category, which Havana denounced last May — after being excluded from the category of “nations that do not fully cooperate in the fight against terrorism” — entails economic sanctions that restrict access to food and medicine, the letter states.
The signees recall that, according to the UN, the designation undermines “fundamental human rights, including the right to food, the right to health, the right to education, economic and social rights, the right to life and the right to development.”
They argue that “it is cruel because it is designed to maximize the suffering of the Cuban people, strangling their economy, displacing their families and restricting the flow of humanitarian aid.”
The classification is also illegal because, according to the United Nations, it undermines “the principle of sovereign equality of states, the prohibition of intervention in their internal affairs and the principle of peaceful resolution of international disputes.”
Other signatories of the open letter are the general secretary of the Mexican party Morena, Citlalli Hernández; the Brazilian deputy Célia Xakriabá; the first vice president of the National Congress of Honduras, Hugo Noé Pino; the Ecuadorian Jahiren Noriega; the French deputy Arnaud Le Gall; the leader of the German party The Left Martin Schirdewany or the former leader of the British Labor Party Jeremy Corbyn.
EFE/OnCuba
Author
OnCuba Staff
