Groups back International Legal Forum report blasting anti-Israel UN inquiry
A coalition of 25 pro-Israel organizations from around the world has signed on to an International Legal Forum (ILF) report castigating the U.N. Commission of Inquiry against Israel as “singularly unprecedented, unjust and completely lacking in impartiality or any legal basis.”
Arsen Ostrovsky
Israel faces a first-time-ever, open-ended U.N. Commission of Inquiry created by the U.N. Human Rights Council. The U.N. General Assembly voted late last year to give the commission a budget of $4.5 million a year, allowing it to hire some 18 full-time staff members—almost the same number as the human-rights office branch of the United Nations covering all of Asia and 60% of the world’s population.
The original basis of the inquiry was the 11-day conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip last May, when the terror group launched more than 4,000 rockets towards Israeli population centers.
The inquiry, however, calls for submissions of evidence of any crimes ever allegedly committed at any point in the past—back to the “root causes” of the conflict or even in the future—as the inquiry’s mandate knows no end, provisions unique to this particular commission.
ILF chair and CEO Arsen Ostrovsky says “this commission makes a complete mockery of international law and is tantamount to an all-out assault against the Jewish state. It only underscores the UNHRC’s persistent, systematic and relentless bias against the State of Israel, which is consistently denied equality before the U.N. body and pronounced guilty from the outset. When it comes to the UNHRC, Israel does not even stand a chance.”
The ILF-led report takes particular aim at Navi Pillay, a former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights and chair of the Commission of Inquiry, whose appointment is contrary to the UNHRC’s own guidelines calling for a history of independence and impartiality in its Commission of Inquiry selections.
The report contends that “any examination of Pillay’s past remarks on Israel makes it clear that she is unable to act in a fair and impartial manner.”
It note that Pillay has “referred to Israel as an “apartheid regime” and accused the Jewish state of “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity”; openly supported the anti-Israel BDS movement; been one of the most ardent champions of the anti-Semitic Durban Conference; repeatedly adopted flagrant double standards when applying international law to Israel, while whitewashing Palestinian terror; and has ties to organizations and individuals affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), an internationally designated Palestinian terror group.”
Dore Gold, former Israeli Ambassador to the United Nations and currently president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (JCPA), wrote the preface to the report, saying: “With the appointment of Navi Pillay to head this ‘Commission of Inquiry’ against Israel, it “would become yet another [U.N.] entity based on foul play and not on strict international legality with some modicum of fairness.”
The report’s signatories join other pro-Israel organizations battling the inquiry, including a group submitting a trove of evidence of Palestinian terrorism in an attempt to balance the commission’s pre-conceived narrative.
The commission’s first report is due next month and is likely to be forwarded to the U.N. General Assembly for recommendations of legal action against Israel in international courts.
The entire UN,and all its affiliated orgs have become antisemitic abominations.
It is outrageous that they still have a voice and only goes to show how biased and cash/favours virtue signalling corrupt that whole criminal institution is at its core.
Their motto should be : “how much? and we’ll do anything!”