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UN Moves Forward to Implement Goldstone Report

(Weekly Standard) Anne Bayefsky - Among the multitude of attacks on Israel that the UN has sponsored, last year's Goldstone report on the 2009 Gaza war stands out for its dangerous distortions of fact and law. Now the UN Human Rights Council has sponsored a second team of investigators to press forward with the report's implementation. This second rendition of Goldstone was crafted by a March 2010 resolution of the Human Rights Council. That resolution first declares that Israel - and only Israel - committed "unlawful acts" in the Gaza war. And then it establishes a committee of experts to monitor and assess all judicial and other proceedings taken by Israel. The members of the new committee were appointed on June 14 by the UN high commissioner for human rights, South African Navi Pillay. One of Pillay's two legal advisers, and chief of her office's "rule of law" branch, is Palestinian Mona Rishmawi, former executive director of the Palestinian NGO al-Haq and until 2000 a prominent director of a unit of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ). All three of the new committee members are affiliated with the ICJ, which has been closely connected with the Human Rights Council's campaign to vilify Israel over the Gaza war, and in particular, the Goldstone report. The ICJ claimed Israel had violated international law during the conflict. The mandate establishing the committee demands the assessment of the "independence" and "effectiveness" of Israeli proceedings and their conformity with international standards. In its statements the IJC claims that the prosecution and punishment of Israeli "civilian leaders and military commanders" for Goldstone's list of crimes is "essential" to conform to those standards. The committee's work will be coordinated by South African lawyer Ahmed Motala. On January 5, 2009, in the middle of the Gaza war, Motala wrote on a South African website: "The war in Gaza and the killing of innocent Palestinians is not about Hamas, but entirely about the forthcoming elections in Israel....What better way to gain the support of the Israeli electorate than to...kill innocent civilians." The only way to respond is to challenge the legal bona fides of the Goldstone report and its progeny and expose the venality of the political agenda inseparable from them. The case must begin by refusing to lend any credence to this latest mutation of the UN virus. The writer is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
2010-07-15 09:14:43
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