Of all the United Nations agencies, the most obscure and self-defeating is the Human Rights Council. There are many organizations and bodies under UN auspices, some of them important for world peace – such as the Security Council and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – and those whose mandate is to clean the world of hunger and human injustices – the World Health Organization, the International Children's Fund, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the Refugee Agency and the Relief and Works Agency, tailor-made to deal with Palestinian refugees.
Each of these contributes to the betterment of humanity. The only UN body with the word human in its name, the UNHRC, is the most detached from humanity.
The UNHRC in Geneva returned last week to its favorite topic, one which it has focused on intensively from its very first session in 2006: Israeli crimes against humanity. To call it anti-Israel is an understatement, and one need not be pro-Israel or pro-Palestinian to deduce such from its track record.
In the 21 sessions since its inception in 2006 as the successor to the heavily criticized Commission on Human Rights, the UNHRC has released seven resolutions calling for investigation of Israeli human rights violations – one-third of its efforts. Four resolutions have been opened in that time against Syria (170,000 dead), two on Darfur (300,000 killed), and one on Libya (25,000 fatalities at the height of its 2011 civil war) – each of these countries guilty of extreme crimes against humanity. None of these resolutions or commissions of inquiry have yielded results other than deploring certain actions and a declaration of intent to investigate. None too, will its latest resolution on Israel.
The UNHRC's resolution on July 23 called for an urgent commission of inquiry into Israel's war crimes in the Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem. It expressed "grave concern" over the lack of implementation from its previous commission charged with investigating human rights violations, led by Richard Goldstone, following the 2009 Gaza war, "convinced that lack of accountability for violations of international law reinforces a culture of impunity, leading to a recurrence of violations and seriously endangering the maintenance of international peace."
In the five pages of its latest resolution, Israel was noted 18 times – once calling for an end of attacks against civilians, including Israeli, and the rest deploring Israeli military aggressions, the incitement of extremist and illegal Israeli settlers, Israeli occupation, Israeli arrests of Palestinians, and Israeli failures to protect Palestinian civilians in accordance with international law. All important, all ignorant of the other side's own activities.
Hamas was not mentioned even once, not even in the brief clause demanding attention to the attacks against Israeli civilians. There was no clause recommending investigation into the Gazan government's use of civilian buildings as cover for its illegal tunnels housing weapons depots and launchers, nor into the widespread reports of its urging residents to ignore Israeli military warnings to evacuate – the word 'human shield' has never once been used in eight years of resolutions.
Twenty-nine of 46 member states voted in favor of the UNHRC's latest resolution, including India, in what has been seen as a major policy shift, as part of its alliance with the BRIC countries. Only the United States voted against the resolution; 17 countries abstained – all European. Their abstention, as the major voting bloc in the council, was tantamount to approval; in the UNHRC there is an automatic majority against Israel.
The resolution, as in most of the UN bodies – including the General Assembly and the Security Council - is not binding. It is a recommendation alone, one that reflects the "resolve" of a particular body, enforcing the views of its member states. There is little chance of legal intervention and unless the International Criminal Court or member states of the UNHRC choose to adopt the body's decision as legally binding nationally, the resolution will have no official impact on Israeli actions, nor can it threaten its legal status in international law.
What this resolution does, in effect, is isolate Israel as a violator of human rights, regardless of circumstance. In expressing its concern over the "lack of findings" in Goldstone's 2009 report, it neglects to mention that Goldstone himself retracted his findings of Israeli guilt of war crimes and possible crimes against humanity [an investigation which Israel refused to cooperate with]: "While the investigations published by the Israeli military and recognized in the UN committee's report have established the validity of some incidents that we investigated in cases involving individual soldiers, they also indicate that civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy," Goldstone said in his retraction.
Goldstone, who also served as chief prosecutor in the international tribunals of Yugoslavia and Rwanda following those genocides, criticized the UNHRC at the time of his retraction as a body that "repeatedly rush[es] to pass condemnatory resolutions in the face of alleged violations of human rights law by Israel but ... have failed to take similar action in the face of even more serious violations by other States. Until the Gaza Report they failed to condemn the firing of rockets and mortars at Israeli civilian centers."
The pattern is clear. The United Nations Human Rights Council has no bearing on international law, only on opinion. International efforts to determine crimes against humanity must not be left to an obscure council to determine – particularly not one in which nearly half of its members abstain in vote. There are tribunals for these prosecutions, obliged by international law to take into context the full picture – in this case, not just Israeli violations, but those of Hamas too. Any tribunal that fails to mention the crimes of Gaza's rulers has failed in its task of adhering to international law, regardless of its findings on Israeli actions.
The United Nations Human Rights Council should focus its efforts on the massacres still happening in Syria and in Iraq's Mosul region – where militias unbound by international law are at relentless and unsupervised war.
The conflict between Israel and Hamas – the latter which wishes to be seen as a viable regime with nearly three million people under its authority, with little military and political support – must first be concluded in a cease-fire between the two governments and then in a political agreement involving either the Palestinian Authority or an international supervising force, to ensure a long-standing cease-fire. Declarations of crimes against humanity on the part of Israel are premature, preconceived, and ignorant of the facts on the ground.
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