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.Only a fool would attribute humanitarianism to the Muslim-centric UN.
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.”
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.
Keyword(s): UN bias against Israel
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