Source: http://webcast.un.org/ramgen/conferences/hrc2006/four/hrc070323am-eng.rm?start=00:05:19&end=00:09:04

Human Rights Council
Fourth Session
March 23, 2007 

Syria

Mr. President, we thank you for your patience and we thank Professor Chinkin for her informative statement delivered yesterday.  Mr. President, here you have the story.  On the 8th of November 2006, a Palestinian mother of seven children in Beit Hanoun prepared breakfast for her children and she went to the kitchen to bring the teapot when she heard the terrible explosion in her house.  The mother went back to the lounge to find the flesh and the carnage of her seven children mixed up with cheese, olives, and bread.  Before that and on the 19th of March, seven American soldiers gang raped the 14 year old Iraqi girl Abeer al-Janabi in the Iraqi town of al-Mahmudiyah.  After murdering her father, her mother, and even her 3 year old sister, after that, they suffocated the victim with a cushion and set her fragile body to fire while she was still alive as the witnesses confirmed later.  Different locations but the same killers- and for the same ideological objectives.  It’s quite obvious, Mr. President, however, that these shocking crimes are committed with a strong feelings of impunity while they represent just tip of the iceberg of the hellish life of civilians in both countries.

The representative of Israel yesterday launched an attack on the Council, on Mr. John Duggard, and the very preoccupation of the Council with the atrocities committed by the occupation  state.  This is however typical of the Israeli reaction to the international legal obligations.  Why not when they have the political umbrella of the west who murdered the first ever UN envoy to Palestine, namely Folke Bernadotte in 1948 and the murderer became later on the Prime Minister of Israel.  

The representative of Israel told Al-Jazeera two months ago on the front door of___ that all these resolutions and missions of the Security—of the Human Rights Council will not be of any use.  Mr. President, what is quite astonishing is the deafening European conspiracy of silence about these crimes despite claims of championship of human rights protection and particularly after the moral heroism they demonstrated two days ago concerning the situation in Darfur.  This is why their American colleagues justified the massacre on the basis that there is a difference between victims of military operations and those as a result of terrorist attacks.  I think that we all expect from this Council is to clear its moral grounds for the history to come through naming those violations and crimes but by what they are really.  Otherwise, it will start with one leg and it will end up on a wheelchair.

Thank you, Mr. President.