Goldstone Commission member appointed special rapporteur on “Israel’s violations of the bases and principles of international law.”
Deciding that the vetting committee's choice for the UN’s next special rapporteur on “Israel’s violations of the bases and principles of international law,” the United Nations 'human rights council' has decided to appoint
Goldstone Report co-author Christine Chenkin to the position, replacing Richard Falk. The Arab group at the 'human rights commission' decided that the vetting committee's choice was not anti-Israel enough.
The only power that can yet stop these outrageously partisan and problematic appointments before tomorrow’s plenary decision is the Obama Administration.
When council president Baudelaire Ndong Ella tomorrow moves the nominations, the U.S. — if it is to live up to its pledge to use its UNHRC membership to fight bias, politicization and double standards — must take the floor, call a vote, and vote No.
Because the UN desperately seeks to make such appointments by consensus, the president may change his mind if he knows in advance and for certain that the U.S would challenge these two objectionable nominations.
If the U.S. fails to call a vote and stand up for what is right, it will have forfeited its moral justification for serving on a council that just elected Putin, the Castro regime, the Chinese Communist Party, and the House of Saud.
More on Chenkin's anti-Semitic background
here.
Labels: Christine Chenkin, Goldstone Commission, Goldstone Report, Richard Falk, United Nations Human Rights Council
Goldstone going for career advancement on Israel's back again
Richard Goldstone, the author of the discredited Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead, has inserted himself as Chairman of the Coalition for the International Criminal Court (CICC), an organization that is helping to
select judges for the International Criminal Court (ICC). Both the CICC and its advisory council are filled with a collection of UN hacks that should raise some eyebrows. And although Israel, the 'Palestinians' and the United States are not members of the ICC, the 'Palestinians' are seeking to have Israel hauled before the court (which could theoretically happen were a determination made that Israel's judicial system is not competent to investigate the behavior of - for example - the IDF), and that effort is likely to become more intense if the 'Palestinians' are granted full membership in the United Nations. George Soros also has a hand in this....
Officially, Goldstone’s panel has no power to dictate anything regarding the ICC; it can only advise. But at the CICC, Goldstone has embedded himself amid a clique of former U.N. officials well versed in working the system, and in some cases used to working together. For instance, the CICC’s 14-member advisory board includes one of Goldstone’s three co-authors of the Goldstone Report, Pakistani lawyer Hina Jilani. Following Goldstone’s walk-back in April, she defended the report as an important document that nothing can invalidate.
The advisory board also includes Goldstone himself, and former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour — who in 2006 used her U.N. pulpit to protest the execution of Saddam Hussein, and in 2008 welcomed an anti-Semitic Arab-rights charter, before waffling away from it under public criticism.
The five-member “Independent Panel on ICC Judicial Elections” includes a Chilean former judge, Cecilia Medina Quiroga. She’s a veteran of a pre-Goldstone U.N. fact-finding mission dispatched by the Human Rights Council to Gaza which also included a British lawyer who later was another co-author of the Goldstone Report, Christine Chinkin.
Two other panel members have served as judges for the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, where Goldstone in the mid-1990s was chief prosecutor. They are South Korean former justice O-Gon Kwon (still serving on the near-eternal Yugoslavia tribunal) and an American former judge, Patricia Wald, former chair and current member of the board of George Soros’s Open Society Justice Initiative.
The fifth panel member is a Swedish lawyer, Hans Corell, who served as legal counsel to the U.N. from 1994 to 2004. Under former secretary-general Kofi Annan, Corell was heavily involved in the creation of the ICC. He also had a hand in the creation and management of the U.N.’s Oil-for-Food Program, a relief plan so badly designed, so mismanaged, and so globally corrupt that Annan was finally forced in 2004 to call for a special inquiry — in which Goldstone served as a member of a three-man panel, led by former U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker. The committee exonerated Annan of deliberate wrongdoing, but not of a “cumulative management performance” that “fell short of the standards that the United Nations Organization should strive to maintain.” Today, Kofi Annan chairs the CICC advisory board.
And what, exactly, is the CICC, which has gathered all these folks together? Funded by donors such as George Soros’s Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the European Union, it is a program run by a nonprofit organization called the World Federalist Movement/Institute for Global Policy. Registered in New York, with another office in The Hague, the World Federalist Movement enjoys consultative status with the U.N., and campaigns for “World Federalist government.”
A spokesman for the CICC, reached by phone, says Goldstone’s report on the ICC judicial candidates will probably be released sometime next month. Nothing here precludes the possibility that Goldstone might have learned from his self-confessed mistakes. Nonetheless, there’s something in this CICC welter of old U.N. hacks and fresh presumption that gives added heft to the obvious question: Does the world really need another Goldstone Report?
What could go wrong?
Labels: Christine Chenkin, Goldstone Report, Hina Jilani, International Criminal Court, Louise Arbour, Richard Goldstone
NGO Monitor rips Goldstone Commission members
In response to Thursday's Comment is Free piece by
members of the Goldstone Commission in al-Guardian, NGO Monitor has issued a statement.
“From the beginning, it was clear that all the members of the so-called ‘fact finding’ exercise lacked the qualifications necessary to asses the events of the Gaza war, as well as demonstrating conflicts of interest and biases. It is also not surprising to see how closely their defense of the report reflects Amnesty International’s own statements,” said Professor Gerald Steinberg, president of NGO Monitor. “Chinkin had been a consultant to Amnesty, while Jilani and Travers signed a highly biased letter spearheaded by Amnesty accusing Israel of “war crimes” before their appointment to the UN body. Now they are again joining forces with Amnesty’s ideologues to counter Goldstone’s belated retraction. Morally, they have an obligation to follow the courageous example of Goldstone, and admit they were wrong.”
NGO Monitor also notes that among the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that provided the allegations included in this discredited report, Amnesty was particularly influential. At a UNHRC-run townhall meeting for NGOs in Geneva in May 2009, representatives from Amnesty International gave a detailed outline for the report’s contents to the Goldstone mission members. Indeed, Amnesty’s recommendations closely corresponded to the final report.
Steinberg added, “It took two years, but Judge Goldstone has now acknowledged the obvious – that the UN Human Rights Council is totally biased, and therefore, the mandate, mission and report lack any moral or substantive validity. The fact that Hila Jilani, Christine Chinkin, and Desmond Travers cling to the anti-human rights agenda set by Libya, Iran, Cuba, China, and other core violators at the UNHRC serves to highlight their moral blindness.”
Goldstone's acknowledgment is too little, too late, and Chinkin, Jilani and Travers are determined to spearhead the effort to make sure it stays that way.
Labels: Christine Chenkin, Desmond Travers, Goldstone Commission, Hina Jilani
Other members of Goldstone Commission defend report
It should surprise no one that the members of the Goldstone Commission other than Goldstone himself are
still defending the report We concur in our view that there is no justification for any demand or expectation for reconsideration of the report as nothing of substance has appeared that would in any way change the context, findings or conclusions of that report with respect to any of the parties to the Gaza conflict. Indeed, there is no UN procedure or precedent to that effect.
The report of the fact-finding mission contains the conclusions made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of its reliability and credibility. We firmly stand by these conclusions.
Also, it is the prerogative of the UN to take cognisance of any evidence subsequently gathered under domestic procedures that it finds credible and in accordance with international standards. Over 18 months after publication of the report, however, we are very far from reaching that point.
The mandate of the mission did not require it to conduct a judicial or even a quasi-judicial investigation. The mission and the report are part of a truth-seeking process that could lead to effective judicial processes. Like all reports of similar missions of the UN, it provided the basis for parties to conduct investigations for gathering of evidence, as required by international law, and, if so warranted, prosecution of individuals who ordered, planned or carried out international crimes.
In the case of the Gaza conflict, we believe that both parties held responsible in this respect, have yet to establish a convincing basis for any claims that contradict the findings of the mission's report.
Given what we know about the
biases of the other
group members, this is not at all surprising. They were more than willing to put their prestige behind this report. And now, it is they who will try to keep it in the public domain.
By the way, please let me know if you find the word "Hamas" anywhere in their statement.
What could go wrong?
Labels: Christine Chenkin, Desmond Travers, Goldstone Commission, Hina Jilani
