PRESS RELEASE
Report: UN’s Palestine Monitor Ignored
Palestinian Authority Rights Abuses
GENEVA, July 9, 2021 — Ahead of today’s United Nations Human Rights Council’s debate with its monitor on Palestinian rights Michael Lynk, the Geneva-based non-governmental organization UN Watch released a report accusing him of systematically ignoring violations by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and the group’s director Hillel Neuer will be taking the floor this afternoon to challenge the UN official.
“No other country mandate focuses on just one side to a conflict,” notes the report. As Special Rapporteur, Lynk is charged only with investigating “Israel’s violations.”
The UN has published the report as an official document in conjunction with the 47th session of the UNHRC, which runs until July 13.
The report criticizes Lynk for issuing “one-sided” press releases during the most recent conflict between Israel and Hamas that “legitimize Hamas terrorism and deny Israel’s right to self-defense.”
Among the examples given are Lynk’s justification of Hamas attacks on Israeli civilians “as a response to the ‘dispossession and the denial of rights in the occupied Palestinian territory’,” and his ignoring “Hamas rejectionism and incitement.”
The report accuses the UN monitor of creating “false moral equivalency between offensive, unprovoked Hamas rocket attacks and the targeted, defensive Israeli response,” and misrepresenting Israeli actions to stop rocket launches as deliberate attacks on civilians.
UN Watch found that Lynk “ignores the vast majority of PA and Hamas violations” against their own people, including censorship and arbitrary arrests carried out by the PA in the West Bank, as well as Hamas’ exploitation of Gaza civilians as human shields “to maximize Palestinian civilian casualties, as part of its propaganda war against Israel.”
UN Watch’s report also addressed Lynk’s failure to address Palestinian terrorism against Israelis, such as Hamas’ sophisticated network of terror tunnels, “the sole purpose of which is to attack Israel,” as well as its firing of rockets at Israelis.
The report concluded by urging the UN official “to acknowledge that if universal human rights standards are applied selectively, and systematically denied to any class of people, they cease to be universal standards at all.”
Ahead of today’s United Nations Human Rights Council’s debate with its monitor on Palestinian rights Michael Lynk, UN Watch released a report accusing him of systematically ignoring violations by the Palestinian Authority & Hamas.
Press release:https://t.co/SIxxWn9p8v
— UN Watch (@UNWatch) July 9, 2021
