Anti-Zionism at the United Nations Human Rights Council
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Anti-Zionism at the United Nations Human Rights Council by David Matas (Remarks prepared for delivery to the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism, Faculty of Law, Yale University, 14 October 2010) The newly created United Nations Human Rights Council has obvious problems. Since its inception in 2006, the Council has had two agenda items dealing with country human rights violations, one for Israel, the other for the rest of the world. The Council has a special mechanism dedicated to Israel, "the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967". This is its only mechanism which the Council has decided to continue indefinitely. When assessing the behaviour of the governments of other countries, experts the Council mandates to report on human rights violations go about their business professionally. However, for Israel, the routine is different. Whatever Israel does to defend itself is, for the most part, de-contextualized, and condemned as gratuitous, spontaneous acts of violence against innocents1. The Council has had thirteen special sessions since its inception. Six were focused on condemnation of Israel and seven were directed to all other thematic issues and countries2. No two other sessions had a common country or theme. The Council, as of March 2010, passed twenty seven out of thirty three country resolutions condemning Israel, more than 80%3. Besides Israel, only Burma and 1 David Matas. "Corruption of International Institutions" in Aftershock: Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism,Dundurn Press: 2005. 2 See <www.ohchr.org> 3 UN Watch "2010 UNHRC SCORECARD" at <unwatch.org>. See also 2 North Korea were criticised in resolutions for their human rights records. The Council replaced the United Nations Human Rights Commission, one of the original United Nations organs. The General Assembly, in the resolution creating the Council, recognized "the importance of ensuring universality, objectivity and non-selectivity in the consideration of human rights issues, and the elimination of double standards and politicization,"4 The prime suspect in the charge of politicization was the obsession with Israel. The Commission like the Council after it had two agenda items dealing with country human rights violations, one for Israel and the other for the rest of the world. Human rights experts for the Commission, like the Council, produced all too often misleading reports about Israel. For years, one third of the time and the resolutions of the Human Rights Commission were devoted to Israel alone. The Council though has been worse than the Commission. The Economic and Social Council gave the Commission authority to convoke special sessions in a 1990 resolution. In the sixteen years which followed there were five special sessions, one on Israel. So in the four years of the Council there have been more special sessions on Israel than there were for all countries and topics in the sixteen years the Commission had authority to convoke special sessions. When the Commission began its work after World War II, its focused on standards only and did nothing about countries. The first country target of its attention was Chile, <eyeontheun.org> and Irwin Cotler "UN poisons its human rights mission" The Australian, October 4, 2010. 4 UN Document number A/RES/60/251, 3 April 2006. 3 after the Pinochet coup. The Commission country focus expanded next to South Africa and third to Israel5. Putting Israel number three was already a worrying sign. Nonetheless the attention to Israel, however, unwarranted, was, at least diluted over time by attention to other countries. With the shift from the Commission to the Council, initially, the attention given by the specialized mechanisms to individual countries was carried forward. However, slowly these mechanisms are disappearing, leaving Israel ever more isolated. When the Council met in June 2007, the mandate of the Special Rapporteurs on Belarus and Cuba were discontinued. There was no noticeable improvement in the human rights record of either which justified the discontinuation. The old Commission considered in confidence consistent patterns of gross violations of human rights occurring in any part of the world. The consideration was named the 1503 procedure after the number of the Economic and Social Council resolution of 27 May 1970 which had created it. The new Council carried forward this procedure. The president of the Human Rights Council announced on March 26, 2007 that the Council had decided to discontinue consideration under that procedure of both Uzbekistan and Iran. Again here there was no improvement in the human rights situation of either country before the decisions to discontinue. In December 2007, the Council ended the mandate of its Group of Experts on the human rights situation in Darfur. This was done while the genocide in Darfur continued. 5 David Matas "No More: The Battle Against Human Rights Violations" Dundurn, 1994, Chapter 15. 4 In March 2008, the Council decided to end the mandate of the independent expert on the Democratic Republic of Congo despite the awful human rights situation there. With the Commission, Israel was the world's worst human rights violator. With the Council, Israel has become virtually the only human rights violator. Defenders of the new Council point to the universal periodic review. The Council reviews the human rights record of all countries in the UN at pace sixteen countries a session. The review started with the first session of 2008. The Council has three sessions a year. The cycle will be complete over a period of four years, covering 192 countries6. The review is conducted by the Council itself, in a working group composed of all member states of the Council7. Observer states, that is to say everybody other state, can participate in the review8. The duration of the review for each country in the working group is three hours9. The review is an interactive dialogue10. During those three hours, the subject of the review responds to interventions. Given the time allowed for this response, if the chairs limit state interventions to two minutes, which has become a common practice, 60 state interventions at maximum can fit within the three hours. It did not take long before gross violators states figured out how to game the system. 6 UN Human Rights Council Resolution 5/1, June 18, 2007 paragraph 14. 7 Resolution 5/1 paragraph 18(a). 8 Paragraph 18(b). 9 Paragraph 22 10 Paragraph 21 5 They lined up their friends or those they could bully to register to speak during the two hours, chewing up the time with praise or even justifications for the violations. Since the pool of potential speaker states is the full UN membership and not just the Council membership, the three hours can become quickly consumed with organized filibustering. The very label "review" is misleading. Unlike an expert mechanism report, the review produces no evaluation or assessment of the human rights record of the state under scrutiny, no overall recommendations, observations or statements of concern. All that happens during the course of the review is that other states may make recommendations to the state subject of the review. The state under review decides on its own which recommendations to adopt. The remaining recommendations are just noted11. The universal periodic review, on its own, is better than nothing. However, in context, it has been positively harmful because it has become an excuse for the abandonment of country specific procedures. Countries like Iran or Cuba say that there is no need to have the mechanisms focus on them because they come up for scrutiny in the universal periodic review. This logic, sadly, has seemed to work for virtually every country subject of a special mechanism except Israel. One form of discrimination is selective prosecution. When blacks are prosecuted for murder but not whites, it is no answer to a charge of discrimination that this or that black accused was in fact guilty. Whatever one thinks of the charges of human rights abuses made against Israel, only a person divorced from reality could attempt to justify the disproportionate attention it 11 Paragraph 32 6 gets at the UN Human Rights Council. How has the Human Rights Council gone so badly off track? Why is this happening? The start of the answer is one simple fact. The Council is controlled by the Organization of The Islamic Conference (OIC) states. I do not mean to suggest by this statement that the Conference pulls the strings behind the scenes or that it manipulates in some way the members of the Council. The control is a lot more direct than that. Because of the zany voting structure of the Council, the Conference states control now and have controlled since its inception the majority of votes. The membership of the Council is 47 states. The geographic distribution is Africa 13; Asia 13; Eastern Europe 6; Latin American and the Caribbean 8; and Western Europe and Others Group 7. The OIC, after the first election in 2006, had 16 members on the Council, with a majority in the Asian region and the African regions (Asia seven and Africa nine). Those two regions together, counting 26 states, have a majority in the Council. Therefore the OIC controlled the Council once there was regional bloc voting. The story was the same after the 2007 elections. Fourteen seats on the Council came up for election in 2007. After those elections, the Council had seven OIC states in the Africa region. Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia left; Egypt joined. Since, in total, the Africa bloc is 13, the OIC still had a majority in the Africa bloc. In Asia, the terms of Indonesia and Bahrain expired. Indonesia was re-elected and Qatar joined.