The old UN Human Rights Commission was a body so biased and farcical that it was disbanded last year. The commission met once annually for a six-week session in Geneva, formally devoting one week of each session to condemnations of Israel along with much additional bashing of the Jewish state. Despite protests, the commission’s 2003 session was chaired by a paladin of human rights known as Libya.
But the UN Human Rights Council, set up to replace the commission as part of a putative reform of the UN, doesn’t look much better. As UN critic Anne Bayefsky already noted last February 24 when the president of the General Assembly issued a blueprint for the council, the new design “promises an institution more contemptible than its predecessor.”
The old commission’s basic problem, she pointed out, was its membership, which included beacons like China, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe. But such states adamantly opposed setting any criteria for membership on the new council, and they won. So the council still includes China, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia along with other models of virtue like Algeria, Azerbaijan, Djibouti, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Russia.
The council also, Bayefsky wrote, “significantly shifts . . . power away from the Western regional group.” In the commission, Asian and African states numbered 27 of the 53 members. In the council they have 26 of the 47 seats, and 16 of those 26 belong to Arab/Muslim countries.
Bayefsky’s words proved prescient when the Human Rights Council recently held its first meeting in Geneva. As reported by the UN’s own News Centre, the council adopted four resolutions consisting of empty blather on: “support for the Abuja Agreement [signed in Sudan in 2004 with the aim of ending the Darfur conflict]; avoiding incitement to hatred and violence for reasons of religion or race; the human rights of migrants; and the role of human rights defenders in promoting and protecting human rights.”
The council was able to achieve specificity only in a fifth resolution on “the Israeli human rights violations in occupied Palestine.” Here it voted to make a review of Israel’s alleged transgressions a feature of each of its sessions. The council has already commissioned a report on the topic for its next meeting in September.
And in yet another way the council is actually even worse than the old commission. Whereas the commission held its anti-Semitic circus just once a year, the council will be convening three times a year for that purpose.
The anti-Israeli resolution passed handily by 29-12 with 5 abstentions. Among the yeas were all the Arab members including Jordan, with which Israel signed a peace treaty in 1994, and all the Asian countries except Japan (against) and South Korea (abstained), but including India. The other nays came from Canada and all the European democracies in the council (the U.S. is not a member).
Should Israel, then, at least take heart from the support these democracies gave it? Unfortunately, the opposite is true.
When a fellow democracy is set up for ongoing slander by a kangaroo tribunal, the right reaction is not simply to impotently vote no and let the charade continue. Recent Iranian threats have persuaded even much of Europe that Israel is in existential danger. Meanwhile Israel’s legitimacy has been steadily eroded by a campaign of vilification in which the United Nations has played a part second only to Arab, Muslim, and Western media.
Under such circumstances, for the democracies to keep legitimizing the council by participating in it—especially when it was expressly created to overcome the abuses of the old commission—is actually worse than the predictable behavior of the barbarian bloc. One doesn’t expect countries that torture and murder their own citizens to do other than gang up on a hated or inconvenient democracy like Israel and work to further undermine its tenuous status.
But one could imagine—naively—that the democracies present at last week’s inauspicious debut of the council would announce that they’re withdrawing from it unless it plans to be a true improvement over its Israel-bashing predecessor. Human rights are, after all, worth taking seriously, the cornerstone of democracy and the reason it is superior to the arrangements that prevail in countries like China and Saudi Arabia.
Instead, on Thursday these democracies again idly registered their nays as the council voted 29-11 to demand that Israel halt its military action in Gaza. The Council also decided to “dispatch an urgent fact-finding mission . . . on the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” The special two-day session was convened by the Organization of the Islamic Conference with its many human rights stalwarts. Finland wanly suggested addressing the situation in a “more balanced manner.”
The “fact-finding” team will be led by the South African jurist and longtime Israel-basher John Dugard. Last year Dugard called for Israel’s demise, and on Wednesday he gave a foretaste of his verdict by accusing Israel of violating the “most fundamental norms”of international human rights law.
Again, the democracies are content to play along with a “human rights” travesty that is a thinly disguised attack on the Jews.
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