Situations around Golan Heights and Crimea "manifestly different" — Pompeo

The situations around the Golan Heights and Crimea are "manifestly different," US Secretary of State Michael Pompeo said on Friday at the Rice University in Houston, Texas, TASS reports.

"I mean, the fact patterns are manifestly different," Pompeo said. "There are many, many contested pieces of real estate around the world, and each one has its own manifestly different fact pattern. And what we have tried to do is say, hey, there are these - there is this set of international norms and understandings, there are fact patterns that lay against them, and where those norms line up, we should recognize those," he added.

"And so those two fact patterns — and I don’t want to spend a lot of time on it because it’s complicated, but suffice it to say as we evaluated each of those situations we felt that they were manifestly different as a matter of international law, and we attempted to recognize that distinction," Pompeo noted.