Paris: US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called for a new UN resolution authorising an arms embargo and other stronger measures against Syria if it fails to abide by UN-backed cease-fire aimed at ending the bloodshed on its soil.
Hillary spoke on Thursday at a meeting of top Western and Arab diplomats in Paris. She stopped short of calling for outside military intervention in Syria but said the time has come to impose more consequential measures.
Her address made clear the United States has little faith in the success of the cease-fire plan set forth by special envoy Kofi Annan and that it does not want other nations to settle for weak measures or lose focus on the severity of Syrian President Bashar al Assad's crimes.
US policy has largely amounted to an acknowledgement that Assad is entrenched and that there is little appetite for a foreign military attack to dislodge him. But the UN mandate Hillary seeks would give backbone to a range of measures to assist Syrian rebels fighting the Assad regime.
The Syrian government's crackdown on a popular uprising over the past 13 months is estimated to have killed more than 9,000 people.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said earlier on Thursday that Syria was not honouring the cease-fire, which took effect last week, and that violence was escalating in the Arab country.
Still, any attempt to push for UN sanctions on Syria could meet resistance from Russia and China, which hold vetoes on the UN Security Council and have already twice shielded Syria from UN penalties.
Hillary noted that she laid out the case for UN Security Council resolve in a meeting earlier on Thursday with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov.
"We have to keep (Syrian President Bashar) Assad off balance by leaving options on the table," Hillary told colleagues at the Paris meeting of members of the so-called "Friends of Syria.
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