Member states of the World Health Organization voted on Wednesday to move a Moscow-based office of the WHO to Copenhagen, and urged Russia to stop attacks on hospitals and healthcare facilities in Ukraine.
At the 76th World Health Assembly in Geneva, 80 member states voted to request the WHO secretariat to relocate the European Office for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases to Denmark before the new year.
Alongside Russia, eight member states voted against the draft decision, including North Korea, China and Belarus. Fifty-two states abstained.
A draft decision to relocate the Russian-based office was adopted on 23 May by the Regional Committee for Europe – made up of 53 states from the WHO Europe region – after a vote earlier in in the month.
“Far from politicising the situation, [the draft decision] focuses specifically on lingering health impacts of the war,” said Ukraine’s delegate, addressing the assembly before Wednesday’s vote.
“The full-scale aggression launched by Russia against Ukraine … has triggered one of the largest health and humanitarian crises,” she said. “More than 1,256 health facilities have been damaged and 177 reduced to rubble leaving about 237 health workers and patients dead or injured.”
Russia’s participation in the WHO, which is a UN agency, has been controversial since it invaded Ukraine in February 2022. In April, Russia took the rotating monthly presidency of the UN’s security council. Ukraine’s permanent representative to the UN described the situation as “absurd”.
A petition to remove Russia from the UN, drafted by Civic Hub, a group of Ukrainian and foreign lawyers and diplomats, has gained more than 300,000 signatures online and the garnered support of Ukrainian MPs such as Alona Shkrum, Dmytro Natalukha and Lesia Vasylenko.
Ukraine reportedly sought last year to have Russia suspended from the WHO executive board, but dropped efforts due to legal difficulties.
Removing a WHO office from Moscow can be seen as a small but important victory for Ukraine and its allies.
“The decision reaffirms that Russia’s aggression against Ukraine constitutes ‘exceptional circumstances’,” said Thomas Grant, a lawyer, researcher at Cambridge University and member of Civic Hub. According to Grant, this leaves the door open to suspending Russia’s voting rights under article 7 of the WHO constitution.
“The WHO takes a universalist approach to voting,” Grant said. “Even suggesting that a member might face article 7 suspension is a big step.”
“Hosting a UN office is a privilege not a right,” said a Danish delegate at the assembly. “It comes with obligations, starting with the compliance with the UN charter. This has been violated by Russia in Ukraine.”
Russian delegates accused Ukraine and its supporters of politicising the assembly, and claimed that Ukraine was responsible for the conflict.
Russia submitted a separate draft resolution – cosponsored by Syria, Nicaragua and Belarus – on the “health emergency in and around Ukraine”. The resolution “strongly condemned” use of civilians as “live shields” and expressed “strong concern” about the decision to close the Moscow-based WHO office. The text did not assign responsibility for any of the attacks described in the document.
The Russian resolution was rejected by 62 votes to 13, with 61 abstentions.
Ukraine’s delegate described Russia’s proposed resolution as “a desperate attempt to put the aggressor on par with the victim and avoid responsibility for the attacks on the health systems in Ukraine”.
Earlier in May, Denmark announced that 12 countries will together pay the $5.6m(£4.5m) a year that Russia contributed to running the office.
Maksym Baryshnikov, one of the authors of the Civic Hub petition, welcomed the decision to move the Moscow WHO office as a step in the right direction. “Any international organisation that Russia is a part of becomes a tool in its hand,” he said. “We need to cut this hand off.”
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