Testimony before UN Human Rights Council, Agenda Item 8, July 8, 2019, delivered by Hillel Neuer
Mr. President,
The Vienna Declaration reaffirms “the importance of ensuring the universality, objectivity, and non selectivity in the consideration of human rights issues.”
Today we ask: is this council, created in 2006 to reform the fatal defects of its predecessor, respecting these principles? Let us consider.
In its first decade, the council passed more resolutions against one single country — Israel — then on the rest of the world combined. For the rest of the world, there were sixty seven resolutions. On the world’s only Jewish state, sixty eight. Now, Israel happens to be the only country in the Middle East where Arabs can vote and be elected in free and fair elections.
Is condemning Israel more than Syria, Iran, and the rest of the world combined an act of non-selectivity? Let us look at the council’s record on urgent sessions. It includes one on Libya, one on Sudan, one on Myanmar, one on DR Congo, and listen carefully, eight on Israel.
In these sessions, as in the resolutions, there was not a single condemnation of the Palestinian Authority. Nothing for their torture of dissidents, students and journalists, nothing for there incitment to terrorism, nor anything on Hamas for launching thousands of rockets against Israeli civilians.
Does this Council believe that targeting democratic Israel eight times more than some of the world’s most murderous governments is an act of objectivity?
When this Council turns a blind eye by not adopting a single resolution nor urgent session for victims in Saudi Arabia, China, Zimbabwe, Pakistan, Cuba, and more than one hundred and sixty other countries that go ignored, is this an act of universality?
