Caracas - Venezuela will present more than 12 million signatures collected in Venezuela and around the world to the United Nations later this month.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro announced that he will not attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York at the end of September, but that Vice President Delcy Rodríguez and Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza will represent the nation at the annual international event.

"I went to New York last year, this year I will not go. ... Delcy will go with the foreign minister to deliver our voice, our truth," said the president to supporters in Caracas.  The Venezuelan president said that he will remain in country because he has an "intense" agenda to defend the country.

"I have a lot of work to do for the country, to defend the peace of Venezuela, to continue carrying out this plan of recovery, growth, social prosperity," he said.

He also explained that Rodriguez and Arreaza will give a letter to U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres explaining the the government has collected over 12 million signatures over the past month from supporters who reject Washington's economic and commercial blockade imposed on Venezuela, making it impossible for the nation to get access to its assets outside the country, or for any other countries to do business with Venezuela.

Rodriguez and Arreaza will personally take the petitions to New York.  According to provisional information from the U.N., Maduro was scheduled to speak before the General Assembly on September 26.  Last year, Maduro was present at the U.N. high-level summit, where he charged United States President Donald Trump for the Venezuelan economic crisis, but also offered dialogue.

Arreaza, who will stand in for the president at the U.N. in New York later this month, spoke Thursday in front of the U.N. Human Rights Council in Geneva saying that the current U.S. administration’s blockade on Venezuela is creating “overcompliance” of economic sanctions by other governments and companies out of fear of retaliation from the United States.

The foreign minister reiterated that the U.S. has “stolen” Citgo, a Venezuelan oil company, from the nation, depleting it of $12 billion that could be used to “pay for five full years of food and medicine for the Venezuelan population."

“Unilateral coercive measures … kill human beings in the countries where they are applied,” stressed Arreaza Thursday at the Geneva meeting.

He added that the Charter of the United Nations does not address such measure, but should. Despite the illegal and lethal blockade, Maduro is applying the Plan for Assistance to the Victims of the Blockade and the Economic War that includes free, new homes for over five million families.