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Time to Leave the UN Human Rights Council

(Politico) Noah Pollak - There is a longstanding tradition in international law of deference in legal matters to national courts and governments. As enshrined in the UN Charter and in customary international law, states are given primacy in investigating and prosecuting misconduct during war - one recent example being the U.S. military's prosecutions of abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It is only in cases where there is no state authority, or a state refuses to investigate credible allegations of large-scale atrocities, that international bodies may be entitled to get involved. Israel's legal system, both civil and military, conducts rigorous investigations into allegations of wrongdoing. It ranks with those of the leading liberal democracies as one of the most professional and independent in the world. The UN Human Rights Council is now seeking to "implement" the findings of the Goldstone Report on last year's war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas. It is led by a German radical named Christian Tomuschat, who performed legal advisory work for Yasser Arafat in 1996, and in 2002 wrote that Israel's targeted killings of terrorists - the same policy the U.S. currently employs in Afghanistan and Pakistan - means that Israel "uses the same tactics as the terrorists themselves." The Council's new "investigation" is a foreordained farce intended to slander Israel, restrict its right to self-defense, and weaken its international standing.
2010-08-19 08:49:55
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