UN expert compares Gaza to concentration camp
Associated Press
July 8, 2005
The Jerusalem Post
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The UN should condemn one of its human rights experts for comparing the Gaza Strip to an immense concentration camp, a Geneva-based campaign group said Thursday. 
UN Watch, which monitors the world body's compliance with its charter, said it has written Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other senior UN officials to urge them to condemn Jean Ziegler's obscene analogy. 
According to a report in Swiss newspaper Le Courrier, Ziegler - who is U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food - also called on a pro-Palestinian meeting to pressure Europeans to boycott Israeli goods. 
Mr. Ziegler's hateful remarks come precisely one year after Kofi Annan's call for vigorous UN action against anti-Semitism, said UN Watch chief Hillel Neuer. Under the European Union's definition of anti-Semitism, 'drawing comparisons of Israeli policy to that of the Nazis is a classic manifestation of this form of hatred.' 
The campaign group also said it had written several member states of the UN Human Rights Commission who bear a particular responsibility to speak out because they voted to extend Ziegler's mandate in 2003. 
Those countries were Canada, Costa Rica, France, Germany, Ireland, Mexico and Britain. 
Australia and the United States did not support the renewal of Ziegler's three-year term. 
But Ziegler's views are his own and not those of the United Nations, stressed UN associate spokesman Farhan Haq. 
The United Nations believes any comparison between conditions in Gaza and those of Nazi concentration camps is irresponsible, Haq said in a statement from UN headquarters in New York. Such a comparison does not reflect the views of the secretary-general.