Anti-Israel bias has been a pervasive feature of the United Nations Human Rights Council since its inception nine years ago, according to a report issued yesterday by the watchdog group UN Watch.
In the nine years of its existence, the UN Human Rights Council has condemned Israel more times than the rest of the world combined, revealed UN Watch today, ahead of a new report to be released by the Geneva-based NGO that documents endemic selectivity and politicization at the world body.
The outcome resolution for the latest Gaza report, to be introduced at the UNHRC this week by the Palestinians together with the Arab and Islamic states, will condemn Israel exclusively, and will mark the 62nd resolution targeting Israel since the new and improved Council was created in 2006 — while the total of all other UNHRC condemnatory resolutions for the rest of the world amounts to 55, with most of the worst violators given a free pass, if not a seat on the council itself.
Sadly, with members like China, Russia, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Venezuela and Qatar, the UNHRC today may possibly rank as a more corrupt international organization than FIFA.
The report includes a number of graphics and charts that illustrate the bias. One detail that exemplifies the council’s bias is the existence of Agenda Item 7, “the Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which is one of ten permanent items on the council’s agenda. No other agenda item targets a specific nation.
This may explain why the UNHRC has condemned Israel 61 times—more than all other nations combined—while it has only condemned Syria, where over 200,000 people have died in its civil war, 15 times. The council has also held seven emergency sessions focused on Israel, but only four on Syria.
Israel also had a special rapporteur assigned to its case. From 2008 to 2014, the rapporteur was Richard Falk a professor who subscribes to 9/11 conspiracy theories.
The UNHRC was supposed to an improvement over its predecessor, the UN Human Rights Commission, but as Claudia Rosett wrote for Forbes in 2009:
The Human Rights Council [was] born three years ago out of the ashes of the former U.N. Human Rights Commission–an outfit which in 2003 became a world-class symbol of U.N. perversion by choosing Libya to chair its proceedings. The Commission was so hopelessly twisted–obsessed with condemning Israel while prone to excusing the worst human rights violators–that as part of the U.N. reform efforts of recent years, it was finally dissolved and replaced in 2006 by the current Council.
However, after a brief pause to update the stationery, the Council began proving, if anything, even worse than the old Commission. Excusing, glossing over or simply ignoring the violations of some of the worst abusers, the Council, as noted by a Geneva-based non-governmental organization, UN Watch, has devoted more than 80% of its country resolutions to condemning Israel, while “eroding free speech protections in the name of Islamic sensitivities and steadily eliminating country investigations in places like Belarus, Congo, Cuba, Liberia and Sudan.”
[Photo: UN Human Rights Council / YouTube ]