Israel 'Boycotts' UN Rights Council Session on Jewish Settlements in Palestinian Territory
March 22, 2015
AFP - Israel's representative
was conspicuously missing when the UN Human Rights Council started a
special session Monday on the
situation in the Palestinian territories
and the 2014 Gaza conflict.
"I note the representative of Israel is not present," said council president Joachim Ruecher.
Israel
provided no immediate explanation for not being present at the session
dedicated overwhelmingly to discussion of its policies and alleged
abuses, but a source close to the council said its absence clearly
amounted to a boycott.
"We won't comment on that," a spokeswoman with the Israeli mission in Geneva told AFP.
The United States was also absent from Monday's discussions.
Asked
to explain why the United States was not taking part, a spokesman said
only that the US ambassador to the council Keith Harper was in
Washington.
Monday's session had
originally been scheduled to discuss a probe on the 50-day war in Gaza
last year, but the investigators obtained a delay after the head of the
team quit under Israeli pressure.
"The
process cannot be rushed," former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis,
who has taken over as head of the team, told the council.
- Gaza in 'stranglehold' -
Canadian
international law expert William Schabas resigned as chair of the
Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict last month after Israel
complained he could not be impartial because he had prepared a legal
opinion for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in October 2012.
Schabas
strongly denied that he was beholden to the PLO but said he was
reluctantly stepping down to avoid the inquiry into the July-August
conflict -- commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council -- being
compromised in any away.
Israel was not satisfied,
calling for the entire inquiry to be shelved, insisting the commission
and the Human Rights Council which created it are inherently biased
against the Jewish state.
It
is the only country in the world with a special agenda item dedicated to
it, meaning its rights record is discussed at every session of the UN's
top rights body.
Its absence Monday does not mark the first time it has boycotted the council.
It
cut all ties with the council in March 2012 over its plans to probe how
Jewish settlements were harming Palestinian rights, and did not resume
relations until late 2013.
Monday's session came after Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's right-wing Likud party scored an
unexpected election victory last week.
The US absence Monday
sparked speculation over whether it aimed to avoid having to stick up
for Israel, as it usually does, amid cooling relations between the two
allies.
Washington warned last
week it could withdraw its unwavering support for Israel at the UN over
Netanyahu's tough stance on the Palestinians.
A
number of states meanwhile saw the absence of the United States and
most western nations from Monday's debate in a different light.
This
is "a deliberate attempt to undermine the credibility of the Human
Rights Council," said Pakistan's representative, speaking on behalf of
the Organization of the Islamic Conference.
Although
the report on the 2014 Gaza war investigation was delayed until June,
the UN's new Special Rapporteur on the situation in the Palestinian
territories did not hold back.
"The
ferocity of destruction and high proportion of civilian lives lost in
Gaza cast serious doubts over Israel's adherence to international
humanitarian law principles of proportionality, distinction and
precautions in attack," Makarim Wibisono told the council.
He
lamented "acute" needs in Gaza, warning that Israel's continued
"blockade keeps Gaza in a stranglehold which does not even allow people
to help themselves."
The Gaza
conflict ended with a truce between Israel and the territory's Islamist
de facto rulers Hamas on August 26 after the deaths of more than 2,140
Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 people on the Israeli side,
mostly soldiers.
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