China’s envoy to the United Nations in Geneva said on Tuesday that the US army and other coalition partners’ forces should be held accountable for suspected human rights breaches in Afghanistan.

“The United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other nations must be held accountable for human rights violations perpetrated by their forces in Afghanistan,” China’s envoy Chen Xu said at an extraordinary session of the Human Rights Council on Afghanistan.

“Under the banner of democracy and human rights the US and other countries carry out military interventions in other sovereign states and impose their own model on countries with vastly different history and culture,” he said, saying this brought “great suffering”.