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HUMAN RIGHTS COUNCIL
1st session
19 – 30 June 2006

Joint written statement submitted by the World Young Women’s Christian Association (World YWCA) in special consultative status, World Alliance of Young Men’s Christian Associations (YMCA) in special consultative status, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) in special consultative status, General Arab Women Federation (GAWF) in special consultative status, Pax Romana (International Catholic Movement for Intellectual and Cultural Affairs and International Movement of Catholic Students) in special consultative status and the International Youth and Student Movement for the United Nations (ISMUN) in general consultative status and the International League for the Rights and Liberation of Peoples (LIDLIP) in special consultative status

Protecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People
 
The above listed non-governmental organizations look forward to contribute actively to the work of the newly elected Human Rights Council in promoting and protecting human rights worldwide.

We appreciate that this first session of the Council must take steps for the speedy implementation of General Assembly resolution 60/251 of 15 March 2006.

In establishing the Human Rights Council as a subsidiary body of the General Assembly, much emphasis was placed on the Council’s ability to respond to emergency situations resulting from severe violations of human rights. We strongly urge you to decide at this first session to take immediate steps to respond effectively to the humanitarian disaster befalling the Palestinian people in their territories occupied by Israel.

The Palestinians are under siege. Hospital patients are dying from lack of medicines and food and the people on the whole suffer severely from the lack of basic essentials to life. They are being killed in Israeli military attacks from the air, land and sea. The world’s people would be disillusioned if the new Council were to fail in taking immediate steps to protect the human rights of the Palestinians and act in defending them from these gross human rights violations.

The world’s people will judge the effectiveness of the Council by its implementation of all the provisions of the General Assembly resolution 60/251, particularly those contained in its operative paragraph 4.

We consider that occupation is the worst form of human rights violation and express our confidence in the Human Rights Council to have the human rights situation in every country and any part of it under occupation and the right to self-determination as permanent items on its Agenda, and preserve in the Agenda of the Human Rights Council the specific item on the Question of the Violation of Human Rights in the Occupied Arab Territories, including Palestine.