Israel Matzav

The end of the 'Human Rights Council' delusion

If anyone still believed that the Obama administration was going to turn the United Nations 'Human Rights Council' into anything other than an anti-Israel forum, those dreams should have died this past Friday.

ON THE contrary, the most recent council election, which took place on May 20 at the GA, looked like this. Just before the vote, candidate Kuwait gave each state’s representative in the Assembly Hall a little box decorated with its flag and containing four delightful fresh dates. Austria gave delegates a package of cookies with a pretty bow marked “taste of Austria.”

Costa Rica distributed a colorful red wooden toy cart. India handed out “high elevation darjeeling tea,” and Romania gave out a very nice large calendar. Along with Burkina Faso, where most of the female population has undergone female genital mutilation – aka torture – they were all duly elected.

With their actual human rights credentials off the table, council members adopted a fixed agenda of only a few items to govern their proceedings. One item is devoted to Israel alone and one to all other 191 UN member states. The Human Rights Commission spent 40 years adopting country-specific criticisms, a third of which condemned Israel. Fifty percent of the “reformed” council’s country-specific resolutions and decisions are devoted to Israel-bashing. There have been 12 special sessions in the last five years, and half of them have been on Israel alone. There has been only one “urgent debate” on a country – Israel. There have been more human rights reports commissioned on Israel than on any other state. And only one country is not allowed even to attend the lobbying and information-sharing regional meetings associated with the council sessions – Israel – while “Palestine” is invited to all of them.

Rather than discredit a body that calls itself a human rights authority but reeks of discrimination, and is tasked with promoting tolerance but provides a global platform for hate-mongering, Obama decided to give it American credibility and taxpayer dollars. His No. 1 excuse was the promise to reform it from the inside.

Here’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and UN Ambassador Susan Rice on March 31, 2009, explaining the reason to join: “The Council... is scheduled to undergo a formal review of its structure and procedures in 2011, which will offer a significant opportunity for Council reform.”

US Ambassador to the Council Eileen Donahoe, in a September 13, 2010, New York Times editorial, called the review “a serious self-reflection exercise” and claimed that “if we do not sit at the table with others and do the work necessary to influence the process, US values and priorities will not be reflected in the outcome.”

Even as late as March 25 of this year, a poker-faced administration spokesperson said: “The United States... looks forward to working with UN member states as the HRC review process continues in New York. There is still room to... ensure greater scrutiny of the human rights records of candidates for election to this body.”

ON FRIDAY, those promises were shown to be utterly fraudulent. Every major recommendation that American negotiators made over a process spanning many months, including instituting membership criteria and changing the discriminatory anti-Israel agenda, was rejected. Only four states voted in the GA against the outcome of the non-reform reform: Israel, the United States, Canada and Palau.

Read the whole thing. I hope that every Republican candidate will make an issue out of this in 2012 and will commit to withdraw the United States from this sham commission.

By the way, I want to point out one thing I learned from this article, which I did not know before. Guess which country is the only one in the World that is not allowed to attend the Council's sessions. Yes, you guessed it. It's Israel.

Labels: United Nations Human Rights Council

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:28 PM