(UNITED NATIONS) — The U.N. General Assembly is expected to approve Wednesday an Arab-backed resolution calling for a political transition in Syria and strongly condemning President Bashar Assad's regime for its escalating use of heavy weapons, U.N. diplomats said. But the resolution will not have as much support as the assembly's previous resolution last August denouncing Syria's crackdown on dissent, the diplomats said Tuesday, speaking on condition of anonymity because consultations have been private. The 193-member world body is scheduled to vote Wednesday morning on the resolution which also condemns Syria's "gross violations" of human rights, assembly spokesman Nikola Jovanovic said. (More: Syria's Lurking Terror: A History of Sarin Gas) The Arab group decided to seek approval of a wide-ranging resolution on Syria in the General Assembly, where there are no vetoes, to reflect international dismay at the increasing death toll, now more than 70,000, and the failure to end the more than two-year-old conflict. Unlike Security Council resolutions, which are legally binding, General Assembly resolutions cannot be enforced. But approval of an assembly resolution would counter the paralysis of the deeply divided Security Council, where Syria's allies, Russia and China, have vetoed three Western-backed resolutions aimed at pressuring Assad to end the violence. Russia's U.N. Ambassador Vitaly Churkin has sent letters urging all U.N. members to vote "no" on the new resolution. He called it "one-sided and biased" as well as "counterproductive" given the understanding reached by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry in Moscow earlier this month to convene a follow-up international meeting on a political transition in Syria. Argentina's U.N. Ambassador Maria Cristina Perceval, asked Qatar, the lead sponsor, to water down language welcoming the establishment of the Syrian National Coalition, the main opposition group, and to eliminate a reference to "the wide international acknowledgment" that it is the legitimate representative of the Syrian people. She said in a letter, written on behalf of a group of Latin American countries, that they also objected to language welcoming Arab League resolutions on a(http://stats.wordpress.com/b.gif?host=world.time.com&blog=19871253&post=86558&subd=timeglobalspin&ref=&feed=1)
Via: TIME GlobalSpin