Issue 596: UN Watch in the House of Lords: Assessing UNHRC's 1st decade

UN Watch Director Speaks in British House of Lords
“First Decade of the UN Human Rights Council: An Assessment”

UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer  spoke in the House of Lords of the British Parliament on Monday. The event was hosted by Baroness Ruth Deech and the Henry Jackson Society. Click here for audio.

•  Neuer pointed out that the UN’s 47-nation human rights council, which just concluded its 10th anniversary session today, has in its first decade failed to pass a single resolution on the vast majority of the world’s worst abusers. Members of the Council who are gross abusers of human rights—like Algeria, China, Congo, Cuba, Ethiopia, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Venezuela, Vietnam, Qatar—have never once been the object of a single resolution, special session, special rapporteur mandate, or commission of inquiry.

•   Despite the promise of ending selectivity, the Council’s pathological obsession with demonizing Israelis and denying their human rights has never been worse. In its first decade the council has adopted 67 resolutions condemning Israel—and only 61 on the rest of the world combined.
•  The resolutions on Israel are uniquely suffused with political hyperbole, selective reporting, and the suppression of any countervailing facts that might provide balance in background information or context.

•  UNHRC commissions of inquiry like the Goldstone Report, which exonerated Hamas, initiated a new era whereby a terrorist group has come to rely on the Council as an international tool in its war against Israel. Knowing that the Council will condemn Israel based on a false effects-based evaluation of targeting judgments, Hamas is incentivized by the UNHRC to launch rocket attacks against Israeli civilians while placing its own civilian population in harm’s way.
 
•  In March the council instituted a new UN black-list of companies doing business across the 1949 armistice line, to have the UN implement the anti-Israeli BDS campaign — boycott, divestment and sanctions. By legitimizing coercive measures akin to the Arab Boycott of Israel, the Council now seeks to strangle the economic life of Israeli citizens.

Mr. Neuer delivered several additional speeches in London, including remarks at a rally to counter the pro-Hezbollah “Al Quds Day” march. He also met with legal, parliamentary and community representatives.

UN Watch