Israel to tell UNHCR to shape up

By Herb Keinon
March 17, 2005
The Jerusalem Post
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The UN's High Commission on Human rights (UNHCR) needs to clean up its act or be rendered totally irrelevant, Roni Leshno Ya'ar, Israel's representative at the commission's annual meeting, will tell the body Thursday. 
Leshno Ya'ar, the foreign minister's deputy director-general for UN and International Organizations, will deliver a speech saying, This session of the Commission will be a crucial one in determining whether this body will be relevant to the advancement of human rights in years to come. It has become increasingly widely recognized that the Commission has fallen far short of its mission. 
But if the Foreign Ministry had hoped that this year's commission would be any less one-sided than in years past, the hopes were dashed by a report submitted by the special rapporteur on Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories Occupied by Israel since 1967, South African John Dugard. B'nai B'rith International, which is sending a delegation to the commission, termed Dugard's report outrageously one-sided. 
According to a statement put out by B'nai B'rith, Israel has in the past written responses to Dugard's reports highlighting their extreme bias. This year is no different – Dugard's portrayal of Israel's actions continue to be in a vacuum, as if Israel's military actions were solely to oppress the Palestinian population, the statement read. 
Dugard, in his report, advanced three reasons for Israel's construction of the security fence, none of which have to do with terrorism: to incorporate settlers; to seize Palestinian land; and to encourage an exodus of Palestinians by denying them access to their land and water resources and by restricting their freedom of movement. 
Dugard concluded his report by saying that Israel's continued construction of the security fence in defiance of international law poses a threat not only to the international legal order but to the international order itself. This is no time for appeasement on the part of the international community. 
Ya'ar, in calling for a more balanced approach in the commission, will quote from a recent report for UN reform drawn up by a panel appointed by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, which stated that in recent years, the Commission's capacity to perform [its] tasks has been undermined by eroding credibility and professionalism. The Commission cannot be credible if it is seen to be maintaining double standards in addressing human rights concerns. 
Ya'ar is expected to tell the committee that these double standards are nowhere in greater evidence than in its treatment of Israel and the Middle East. In his speech, he will state, Is there any possible justification for treating every country situation under one agenda item, and having a separate agenda item for one country alone? Is there any possible excuse appointing a special rapporteur with an open-ended mandate to examine one side of a conflict but not the other? Or for the repeated anachronistic resolutions which ignore positive developments in the region, and come back to stain the work of this Commission year after year? 
He will also quote from a Human Rights Watch report delivered last week that stated, The Commission traditionally neglects or downplays abuses by Palestinian armed groups. That selectivity should end. The Commission should condemn Palestinian armed groups for their deliberate and indiscriminate attacks on civilians and call on the newly elected Palestinian Authority to undertake all efforts consistent with international human rights standards to curb these attacks.