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UN Rights Council Ends Session by Slamming Israel Again

In the final day of its third regular session, the UN Human Rights Council condemned Israel twice, bringing its total number of resolutions against the Jewish state, in its six months of existence, to eight. Israel is the only country in the world that the Council has condemned for human rights violations since it was inaugurated in June. Today's censures were the only Council resolutions from this session that addressed a specific country.

The two texts deal with "follow up" to two earlier Council resolutions pronouncing Israel guilty of human rights violations in Gaza and in Lebanon without mentioning the actions or violations of Hamas or Hezbollah, which were widely criticized by Western states and human rights organizations as one-sided. Both of today's resolutions mandate additional reporting on and scrutiny of Israel's conduct when the Council meets again in March.

"The Council, regrettably, continues to defy the repeated pleas of Secretary-General Annan to move past its obsession with one-sided resolutions against Israel," said UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. "At the expense of victims around the world- in Burma, Libya, Zimbabwe and the 16 other places on Freedom House's 'Worst of the Worst' list-the Council is reserving virtually all of its criticism for Israel, and today's resolutions guarantee that this imbalance will continue at its next session."

The only other country situation on which the Council has passed a resolution in its first six months is that of Darfur, Sudan. That resolution, however, neither accuses Sudan of committing violations nor holds it responsible for halting the ongoing atrocities in Darfur. Instead, the soft text-sponsored by the Council's African group, supported by Sudan, and opposed by the European Union and Canada as too weak-merely "notes with concern" the situation in Darfur, which it attributes to "all parties," and it even "welcomes" the Sudanese government's "cooperation" and urges the international community to give it financial support.

The Council will hold a special session on Darfur on Tuesday but according to Neuer, "given the African and Islamic Groups' strength at the Council, any resolution coming out of that session, unfortunately, is likely to be similarly weak." Sudan this week once again told the Council that the well-known facts about the Darfur crisis-which have been widely documented by UN officials, human rights and humanitarian relief organizations, and the media-are "misinformation" and "exaggeration," and its assertions have been supported by its African and Islamic group allies. Sudan distributed fact sheets to the Council on Tuesday claiming that there have been only 9,000 victims in Darfur, "from all sides," and boasting of its record on combating violence against women.

The Council's three previous special sessions, held in July, August, and November, all focused on Israel. All resulted in sharply one-sided condemnations of the Jewish state-over the objection of the Council's Western democracies-that made no mention of Hamas and Hezbollah unprovoked attacks across international borders or rocket attacks against Israeli civilians.

Source: UN Watch