United Nations Human Rights Council Resolutions Condemn Only Israel, Diplomats Say

UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. Human Rights Council will end its second regular session this week by voting to pass two resolutions condemning Israel and may approve “balanced” measures on other countries where human rights are violated, diplomats in Geneva said yesterday.The council is expected to hear reports today by several envoys, known as “rapporteurs,” who during the last session were sent on missions to Lebanon and Israel. The special rapporteur on the right to food, Jean Ziegler, will report only on the human rights situation in Lebanon; he did not even visit Israel on his trip to the region.Last week, the rapporteur John Dugard issued a report to the council on the situation in Gaza. After Israel turned the area over to the Palestinian Arabs, it transformed Gaza into a “prison,” he said. “In other countries this process might be described as ethnic cleansing, but political correctness forbids such language where Israel is concerned,” he added.Amnesty International, usually a critic of Israel, has chided members of the council for focusing on what it termed their “narrow political objectives.” And Human Rights Watch has said the new council’s “one-sided approach” on the Israeli-Arab dispute is a “blow to its credibility and an abdication of its responsibility to protect human rights for all.”Although Human Rights Watch supported the creation of the Geneva-based council last spring, its global advocacy director, Peggy Hicks, told The New York Sun yesterday, “We are not satisfied at all” with the way its has functioned so far.However, there still is hope for improvement in the new body, she said. Members from democratic states can carry a majority at the council, though they include many “second-tier democracies,” she told the Sun.America declined to run for a seat at the newly created council in the spring, but the Bush administration has yet to make a decision on joining next year. “The treatment of Israel ought to be the litmus test for any consideration by the U.S. of whether to run for election,” a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Anne Bayefsky, said.Secretary-General Annan has hailed the creation of the council as a major achievement. But since its inception, the only country-specific resolutions the Human Rights Council has passed have concerned Israeli violations.In an address to the U.N. General Assembly last month, Mr. Annan said, “Supporters of Israel feel that it is harshly judged” at Turtle Bay.“Too often this is true, particularly in some U.N. bodies,” he added, and urged the Human Rights Council to widen its focus beyond one country.“Anyone observing the council’s agenda this week might easily mistake it for a meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference,” the executive director of U.N. Watch, Hillel Neuer, said.So far, the 47-member body — where a voting bloc composed of OIC members controls the agenda with an automatic majority in regional groups — has conducted two regular sessions and two emergency sessions on the Arab-Israeli dispute; it has passed resolutions condemning Israel in each of these sessions without addressing violations elsewhere, Mr. Neuer noted.European and African council members have worked out a resolution that would address the situation in Darfur, several diplomats in Geneva said. The proposed text is “balanced” and “weak,” they said, as it was designed to satisfy all of the council members, including allies of Khartoum. Meanwhile, two resolutions to condemn Israel are all but assured approval by the end of the week.Still, the council might be able to push through measures on other regions, including the worsening situation in Sri Lanka, Ms. Hicks said. She noted that after the council passed a similar measure on Nepal during its first session, a new monitoring body was created to oversee human rights there.

United Nations Human Rights Council Resolutions Condemn Only Israel, Diplomats Say

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