UN Watch BriefingLatest from the United Nations  Vol. 540 |  June 25, 2015

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UN Debate on Gaza Report: UN Watch to Lead Response Prominent Officers, Experts, Heading to Geneva for Monday Session of UNHRC                    LIVE WEBCAST: MONDAY, JUNE 29, FROM 11:15 AM EST TO 1:00 PMwww.unwatch.org/gazaresponse HEADING TO GENEVA: Maj-Gen. Michael Jones, Lieutnant-Colonel Geoffrey S. Corn, Col. Richard Kemp GENEVA, June 25, 2015 - UN Watch will be leading an international response to the UN's new Gaza report in the plenary of the Human Rights Council, at a debate on Monday under the 47-nation body's permanent agenda item targeting Israel. The campaign to tell the truth about the war launched last summer by Hamas will include appearances by prominent American, British and European political and military figures at the UNHRC plenary, a press conference, and a panel event for diplomats and human rights activists. Speeches will be posted on our channel at YouTube.com/unwatch. • Senior military experts will present the findings of two fact-finding missions -- the report of the JINSA Task Force on the Gaza Conflict by five U.S. generals, and the preliminary findings of the high-level international group of 11 military and political figures -- both of which contrast sharply with the UN report. Watch their event on live webcast at www.unwatch.org/gazaresponse on Monday, June 29th, at 5:15 pm Geneva time (11:15 am EST to 1:00 pm EST). • A major new book by UN Watch and NGO Monitor, Filling in the Blanks: Documenting Missing Dimensions in UN and NGO Investigations of the Gaza Conflict, will be released at the side event.   • Expert speakers will additionally include Dr. Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who will analyze the funders of Hamas; and NGO Monitor president Prof. Gerald Steinberg and Legal Advisor Anne Herzberg, who will address distortions of the report, and the problematic role played by groups like Human Rights Watch, whose director Ken Roth actively supported Hamas during the war. (See below his infamous "International Humanitarian Law allows" tweet from August 19th, in defense of Hamas terror tunnels.)                    The report of the UN inquiry -- headed for six months by William Schabas until he was forced to resign over his undisclosed paid legal work for the PLO, and then by Mary McGowan Davis, who in 2010 served on a similar committee to implement the notorious Goldstone Report -- repeatedly equates Israel with Hamas, and insinuates that Israel's "political and military leaders" are guilty of war crimes. The UN report concludes with a thinly-veiled call for members of Israel's "political and military establishment, including at the senior level" to be investigated by the International Criminal Court; prosecuted by individual countries that embrace universal jurisdiction; and for other countries to "comply with extradition requests" pertaining to "suspects of such crimes" to be sent to countries where they would "face a fair trial." For analysis of the UN report: • One of the most detailed and damning comes from The Lawfare Blog, affiliated with the Brookings Institution. Brookings senior fellow Benjamin Wittes and Lawfare associate editor Yishai Schwartz are clear: “The UN Human Rights Council’s Independent Commission of Inquiry report on the 2014 Gaza war, released Monday, is a bad piece of work—bad in almost entirely predictable and boring ways, but no less bad for being bad and predictable." • Col. Richard Kemp, the former commander of British forces in Afghanistan, who will be part of the UN Watch delegation, published a brilliant op-ed in today's New York Times -- see below.          ________________________ The U.N.’s Gaza Report Is Flawed and Dangerous By RICHARD KEMP     JUNE 25, 2015 LONDON — As a British officer who had more than his share of fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans, it pains me greatly to see words and actions from the United Nations that can only provoke further violence and loss of life. The United Nations Human Rights Council report on last summer’s conflict in Gaza, prepared by Judge Mary McGowan Davis, and published on Monday, will do just that. The report starts by attributing responsibility for the conflict to Israel’s “protracted occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip,” as well as the blockade of Gaza. Israel withdrew from Gaza 10 years ago. In 2007 it imposed a selective blockade only in response to attacks by Hamas and the import of munitions and military matériel from Iran. The conflict last summer, which began with a dramatic escalation in rocket attacks targeting Israeli civilians, was a continuation of Hamas’s war of aggression. In an unusual concession, the report suggests that Hamas may have been guilty of war crimes, but it still legitimizes Hamas’s rocket and tunnel attacks and even sympathizes with the geographical challenges in launching rockets at Israeli civilians: “Gaza’s small size and its population density make it particularly difficult for armed groups always to comply” with the requirement not to launch attacks from civilian areas. There is no such sympathy for Israel. Judge Davis accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “serious violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law.” Yet no evidence is put forward to substantiate these accusations. It is as though the drafters of the report believe that any civilian death in war must be illegal. Referring to cases in which Israeli attacks killed civilians in residential areas, Judge Davis says that in the absence of contrary information available to her commission, there are strong indications that the attacks were disproportionate, and therefore war crimes. But all we get is speculation and the presumption of guilt. The report is characterized by a lack of understanding of warfare. That is hardly surprising. Judge Davis admitted, when I testified before her in February, that the commission, though investigating a war, had no military expertise. Perhaps that is why no attempt has been made to judge Israeli military operations against the practices of other armies. Without such international benchmarks, the report’s findings are meaningless. The commission could have listened to Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said last November that the I.D.F. had taken extraordinary measures to try to limit civilian casualties. Or to a group of 11 senior military officers from seven nations, including the United States, Germany, Spain and Australia, who also investigated the Gaza conflict recently. I was a member of that group, and our report, made available to Judge Davis, said: “None of us is aware of any army that takes such extensive measures as did the I.D.F. last summer to protect the lives of the civilian population.” The report acknowledges that Israel took steps to warn of imminent attacks but suggests more should have been done to minimize civilian casualties. Yet it offers no opinion about what additional measures Israel could have taken. It even criticizes Israel for using harmless explosive devices — the “knock on the roof” — as a final warning to evacuate targeted buildings, suggesting that it created confusion. No other country uses roof-knocks, a munition developed by Israel as part of a series of I.D.F. warning procedures, including text messages, phone calls and leaflet drops, that are known to have saved many Palestinian lives. Judge Davis suggests that the I.D.F.’s use of air, tank and artillery fire in populated areas may constitute a war crime and recommends further international legal restrictions on their use. Yet these same systems were used extensively by American and British forces in similar circumstances in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are often vital in saving the lives of our own soldiers, and their curtailment would jeopardize military effectiveness while handing an advantage to our enemies. The I.D.F. is not perfect. In the heat of battle and under stress its commanders and soldiers undoubtedly made mistakes. Weapons malfunctioned, intelligence was sometimes wrong and, as with all armies, it has some bad soldiers. Unnecessary deaths resulted, and these should be investigated and the individuals brought to trial if criminal culpability is suspected. The reason so many civilians died in Gaza last summer was not Israeli tactics or policy. It was Hamas’s strategy. Hamas deliberately positioned its fighters and munitions in civilian areas, knowing that Israel would have no choice but to attack them and that civilian casualties would result. Unable to inflict existential harm on Israel by military means, Hamas sought to cause large numbers of casualties among its own people in order to bring international condemnation and unbearable diplomatic pressure against Israel. Judge Davis’s report is rife with contradictions. She acknowledges that Israeli military precautions saved lives, yet without foundation accuses “decision makers at the highest levels of the government of Israel” of a policy of deliberately killing civilians. Incredibly, she “regrets” that her commission was unable to verify the use of civilian buildings by “Palestinian armed groups,” yet elsewhere acknowledges Hamas’s widespread use of protected locations, including United Nations schools. Most worrying, Judge Davis claims to be “fully aware of the need for Israel to address its security concerns” while demanding that it “lift, immediately and unconditionally, the blockade on Gaza.” Along with the report’s endorsement of Hamas’s anti-Israel narrative, this dangerous recommendation would undoubtedly lead to further bloodshed in both Israel and Gaza. To support the vital work of UN Watch, please contribute here. UN Watch is an independent human rights group founded in 1993 in Geneva, Switzerland, receiving no financial support from any organization or government. We rely on the generosity of charitable donations. Thank you for your support.

Faulted For Existing

"The extent of the devastation and human suffering in Gaza was unprecedented and will impact generations to come."
"There is also ongoing fear in Israel among communities who come under regular threat."
Mary McGowan Davis, UN report into 2014 Gaza war

The Human Rights Council in Geneva (photo credit: UN/Jean-Marc Ferré)

"Israel does not commit war crimes. Israel defends itself against a terrorist organization that calls for its destruction and carries out many war crimes. We will continue to act forcefully and determinedly against those who seek to harm our citizens and we will do this according to international law."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

"We will not accept a comparison between terrorists and IDF soldiers. We will not agree to IDF soldiers and terrorists being mentioned in the same breath, and this distinction is important for any country fighting terrorism."
"IDF soldiers are fighting terrorists, even if sometimes civilians are hurt. Terror organizations do not discriminate and kill civilians and soldiers."
Tzipi Livni, co-leader, Zionist Union

"It is well known that the entire process that led to the production of this report was politically motivated and morally flawed from the outset."
Israeli Foreign Ministry

Israel as a 'light unto the world' is obviously expected to sit tight, twiddle its fingers and patiently await the time when its neighbours will accept its presence without threatening to destroy it. That Israel does as any other country under international law will do, and responds to attacks against its population and its territory, enrages those who feel that the country has no right to exist in the first place.

Historical antecedents apart, heritage and proof of unending and durable existence in a land that living history made their own evidently does not serve to support Israel's insistence on its right of existence.

The finding of the UN report on the last war between the Israel Defence Forces and the Hamas terrorist group holding a million Gazans prisoner to their charter declaration purposing to destroy Israel, is that both the terrorist group and the State of Israel are guilty of war crimes. Equating the existential right of a country to defend itself against incessant violent attacks has become, unique to Israel, a war crime.

The fact that Hamas commonly launches its attacks from crowded civilian enclaves including hospitals, hotels, schools and apartment buildings, inviting a response back from Israel that will exact a number of civilian casualties in an effort to destroy the rocket launching sites is of no account, it seems when the UN sanctimoniously denounces Israel for responding to such assaults and in so doing placing civilians in danger.

No other military of any other country comes to mind that advises those inhabiting areas meant to be bombed in advance of the bombing, to enable the populace to clear out and to reduce the potential for civilian death to a minimum.

Balance that against the Hamas initiative to imbue nobility in death, inciting Gazans to defy the pre-warnings and to assemble on the very rooftops of any targeted areas, courting martyrdom for the 'cause' of Hamas's victory against the 'oppressor' whose status as such has been determined by unending assaults against its sovereign territory.

Over 2,200 Palestinian Gazans were killed, most of them aligned with Hamas as fighters, along with the unfortunate deaths of hundreds of civilians when the conflict began in July of 2014 after Israel had warned that the ongoing barrage of rockets targeting border settlements like Sderot would no longer be tolerated, and after Hamas had arranged for the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teenage boys.

When Israel characterized the report as biased, it was with good reason that it took issue with the UN Human Rights Council. The Council is indeed, like much of the United Nations and its various committees, stacked with representatives of countries through enmity and provocation from Muslim states focusing disproportionately on Israel, despite their own dismal human rights records.

Many of those countries have human rights histories of desperately miserable realities, handily overlooked for the greater targeting of a democratic society embattled by its neighbours.

Hamas authorities are outraged, with senior official Ghazi Hamad insisting that the UN report was guilty of an imbalance "between the victims and the killers". Palestinians and their leaders are just so enamoured of the vision of themselves as victims. It's a credo, that of avenging their victimhood, that advances their agenda of blood-letting, an inherited tribal custom.

Hamas rockets and mortars, he insisted, were targeting Israeli military sites, not civilians, a blatant lie that can be easily disproven, but which plays well with the narrative of the innocence of Hamas of wrong-doing and its Euro-digestible public relations protocols. It is what inspires the various iterations of blockade-breaking flotillas so beloved of the international community.

That Hamas officials took shelter in sophisticated and well-appointed underground shelters to ensure their protection from the IDF response to Hamas shelling assaults, while persuading Palestinians of the nobility of martyrdom for the greater cause of Islam, speaks volumes about the morality of Hamas operatives and leadership.

That Hamas looked forward with anticipation of numbers of deaths of Palestinian children as fallout of the conflict the better to flagellate Israel in international public opinion is proven by responses from that public.

It seems clear enough that Hamas rules ruthlessly through fear and violent intimidation, and that not all Palestinians living in Gaza are enthralled with the rule thrust upon them by Hamas. Post-conflict the number of Palestinians who were accused of being collaborators with Israel and summarily killed exists as testament to the Hamas ideology of Islamist terrorism, of bloodshed and of martyrdom; not of themselves but of those whom Hamas is prepared to martyr.

The Amnesty International report on the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict : "Strangling Necks: Abduction, torture and summary killings of Palestinians by Hamas forces during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict" Photo: Anmesty International

The United Nation's Confusion About Human Rights

"[The UN commission set up by the UN Human Rights Council was an] anti-Israel body [with a track record of not responding to true human rights violations around the globe]."
"This is the same council that in 2014 made more decisions against Israel than against Iran, Syria and North Korea combined."
"[Gaza's Hamas rulers] need to be investigated, not Israel."
Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu

"Crimes against humanity, war crimes and the crime of aggression, all of which I think it can be shown have been perpetrated at various times during the history of the State of Israel."
"My favourite would be Netanyahu in the dock at the International Criminal Court."
"When I was asked if I would accept nomination to the Commission of Inquiry, I was not requested to provide any details of my past statements and other activities concerning Palestine and Israel."
William Schabas, Canadian law professor, chair, UN Human Rights Council independent Gaza war inquiry

AP Photo/Jiri Buller    How could Schabas have believed that taking money from one of the sides to a dispute – to provide advice directly related to the subject he was now called upon to consider – would not be a problem.

The 47-member UN Human Rights Council whose makeup is inclusive of Arab and Muslim-majority countries has garnered a reputation of having passed more resolutions specifically condemning alleged abuses committed by Israel, than human rights abuses well known on the record to have been committed by other states, including some of the states sitting on the commission themselves. A bit of nit-picking?

Professor Schabas has defended his record, describing himself as a "scholar involved in international human rights, I have regularly condemned perpetrators of violations. This work in defence of human rights appears to have made me a huge target for malicious attacks", he wrote, in resigning as head of the special investigation. An investigation that human rights luminaries such as China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates voted in favour of.

Mr. Schabas resents his critics who claim that to do justice to the task placed before him he would morally have had to be neutral in his outlook. The Council when calling for the investigation in which he was involved, spoke of "deploring" Israel's "grave violations of the human rights of the Palestinian civilian population", making no note of "Hamas", its terrorist tunnels or its rockets into Israel.

Israel, in other words, committed a grave violation of human rights in seeking to respond to the threats and the real-time danger in which its civilian population found themselves, targeted by Hamas terrorists. Mr. Schabas had worked in 2012 to provide the Palestine Liberation Organization with a legal opinion respecting their approach to the International Court of Justice against Israel.

He claimed in his appointment that he would not allow his past criticism of Israeli leaders to affect his judgement or his ability to carry out the investigation he was charged with heading. Palestinian rockets deliberately made targets of Israel's settlements across the border from Gaza and Israeli civilians; many of those rockets were launched from civilian sites in Gaza.

The International Criminal Court has just  cleared both Serbia and Croatia of having committed "genocide", ruling that neither had an intent to do so, since under the 1948 UN Convention, genocide is defined as acts "committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

As reality has it, Hamas's charter specifically calls for the eradication of the state of Israel; Hamas leaders have stated that it would be most convenient for them and their agenda if more Jews moved to Israel from their worldwide diaspora, since it would make it easier for Hamas to destroy world Jewry if they were all located more conveniently right next door. If that doesn't make their intention genocidal, what would?

The intention of the findings of the  special investigation is to reach a conclusion that could make it very useful for the Palestinians to turn over the findings to the International Criminal Court, to act on the findings, to sit in judgement on Israel. Evidence points to Hamas being more suited to be brought before the International Criminal Court than a country forced time and again to defend its citizens from violent attacks whose purpose is the state's destruction.

UN Watch BriefingLatest from the United Nations  Vol. 522  |  January 6, 2015

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With the Palestinian bid to pursue Israel in the International Criminal Court, all eyes are on the U.N. Commission of Inquiry on Gaza, due to report in March. AIPAC's News Hub interviewed UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer. ______________ In March 2015, the United Nations (U.N.) Independent Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict will release its report to the U.N. Human Rights Council. Read below for an in-depth analysis from leading expert, Hillel Neuer. Hillel Neuer is the executive director of U.N. Watch, a human rights non-governmental organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Mr. Neuer taught international human rights at the Geneva School of Diplomacy. In 2008, he was elected vice president of the Conference of NGOs' Special Committee on Human Rights in Geneva. Neuer has represented 25 human rights groups as chair of the annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy since 2009. Q: On July 23, the U.N. Human Rights Committee (UNHRC) adopted a resolution to set up a commission of inquiry that accuses Israel of potential war crimes, hate crimes and indiscriminate attacks on Palestinians. However, the report fails to mention Hamas. Moreover, it only makes a passing mention of Israeli deaths from rocket fire during the recent fighting, without specifying who fired the rockets. Can a commission of inquiry with this mandate write a fair and balanced report of what is happening in Gaza? NEUER: No, the commission was born in prejudice, and is shaped by it. The choice of William Schabas, a longtime anti-Israel activist, embodies this prejudice. The resolution that created the commission takes for granted that Israel was in breach of its international obligations. It created a commission of inquiry to investigate war crimes in Gaza "in the context of the military operations conducted since June 13, 2014,”which the preamble defined as being those by Israel, and which it condemned as "grave violations.” The context not chosen was the Hamas aggression against Israel. The EU refused to support the one-sided text, correctly saying it was "unbalanced, inaccurate and prejudges the outcome of the investigation by making legal statements.” The late professor Thomas M. Franck, former president of the American Society of International Law, lamented the emergence of this U.N. pattern in the 1970s. He would have said that the Schabas Commission has been established by a mandate that includes conclusory language that palpably interferes with the integrity of the fact-finding process, violating the essential line between political assumptions and issues that ought to be impartially determined. Any fact-finding commission created by terms of reference that seek to direct its conclusions is, in Franck’s words, essentially a waste of time. Its findings, at most, will reassure those whose minds are already made up. Q: Since its inception in mid-2006, the U.N. Human Rights Council has adopted at least 58 resolutions singling out Israel for condemnation. Much of this anti-Israel bias is a result of the Council’s Agenda 7 item. It states that the body must discuss Israel's alleged human rights violations each and every time the Council convenes, regardless of what is occurring in other countries. Does this level of castigation match Israel’s human rights record? Why is the Council so opposed to Israel? NEUER: The resolutions against Israel are not rationally justifiable, but rather one-sided, selective and politicized. They are a product of the anti-Israel political campaign waged by the Arab and Islamic states at the U.N. Beyond the numerical disproportionality of targeting Israel in more than 50 percent of all resolutions, Israel texts differ from all of the other country resolutions because they are suffused with political hyperbole, selective reporting, and the systematic suppression of any countervailing facts that might provide balance in background information or context. By contrast, even the Council’s resolutions on a perpetrator of atrocities such as Sudan – whose president, Omar al-Bashir, is wanted for genocide by the International Criminal Court – regularly included language praising, commending, and urging international aid funds for its government. The practice of singling out Israel – not only with a disproportionate amount of resolutions, but with language that is uniquely condemnatory – constantly reinforces the impression that there is nothing whatsoever to be said in Israel’s favor. The effect, as philosopher Bernard Harrison has carefully shown in his book The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism, which describes this same phenomenon in other influential sectors, is to stigmatize Israel as evil. Q: Though many European countries expressed their support for Israel’s right to defend itself, they chose to abstain rather than oppose the inquiry into Israel’s actions in Gaza. Though they expressed their desire for a more even-handed document, they chose not to vote against it. Why did countries such as France, Germany and the United Kingdom, who have supported Israel’s right to self-defense, not oppose this measure? What does it say about the Human Rights Council? NEUER: Israel is not very popular today in Europe, certainly not among progressive elites or Muslims, an increasingly large and vocal community in the continent. U.N. votes reflect how countries wish to position themselves in response to internal and external pressures. Bear in mind that the U.N. works by vote-trading, and the Islamic bloc has 56 votes to the Jewish bloc’s one vote. Finally, many countries succumb to financial pressure, oil needs and other forms of intimidation. It is shameful that the highest human rights body of the United Nations, along with several of its specialized agencies that are supposed to advance humanitarian and social causes, is being willfully and systematically misused by an organized campaign to assault Israel. Noble principles and purposes, such as human rights, equality and peace, are being subverted by selectivity, politicization and prejudice. The United Nations will never live up to its founding promise so long as this pathology endures. Q: Out of 47 nations voting on this resolution, the United States was the only one opposed. What does this say about the United States’ bond with Israel, and America’s commitment to Israel’s security? What does it say about the other nations who voted on this motion? NEUER: America remains Israel’s most significant ally and supporter at the U.N. It was deeply regrettable that outgoing U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay chose to criticize the U.S. for consistently voting against the Arab states’ one-sided resolutions. Ms. Pillay should have praised America for courageously standing up to prejudice, and against the world’s worst dictators. Moreover, we note that Ms. Pillay has never criticized Russia, China, and Cuba for voting at the U.N. to defend the murderous regime in Syria. This is just one more case of double standards, and of moral confusion. Q: Countries that voted for this inquiry aimed at maligning Israel include: China, Cuba, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia. What kind of message does it send when countries with such appalling human rights records are allowed to single out Israel for international rebuke? NEUER: (William) Schabas told NPR that the resolution creating his commission was “voted democratically.” Yet when a two-thirds majority of tyrannies wins a vote, that is not democracy, but the cynical abuse thereof. Q: As part of your address to the Council, you brought up the deafening silence concerning the plight of the Palestinians in Syria. The Syrian delegate objected to your testimony.  What do you have to say about the seeming hypocrisy of this Council convening a session on Palestinian rights, yet ignoring Palestinian suffering elsewhere in the region? NEUER:  Countries like Syria voiced support for the resolution, but when I called them out on their actual murder of Palestinians, the Syrian delegate objected vehemently. The hypocrisy knows no bounds. Q: There is a fear that the report resulting from this inquiry could lead to another biased and flawed anti-Israel report like the Goldstone Report in 2009. Is there any hope that a Human Rights Council fact-finding mission can yield a fair and balanced report? NEUER: There is, regrettably, no basis to hope for a fair report from a commission with a biased mandate, a biased chairman, a biased staff and a biased council to whom the report will be submitted for adoption. Q: America’s new ambassador to this body, Amb. Keith Harper, ridiculed the bias against Israel during his first speech to the Council. What, if anything, can he and the United States do to prevent this inquiry from yielding another blatantly anti-Israel report? NEUER: I salute Amb. Harper for his strong statement against the bias of the UNHRC. The U.S. should try to pressure the Office of the High Commissioner, which exercises unique influence over the report to ensure balance. I also urge the U.S. to support our call for Schabas to recuse himself on grounds of bias or the appearance thereof.

United Nations, United States, Britain - to the rescue!

Syria's civil war grinds on. The Baathist regime of President Bashar al-Assad has been 're-elected' to another seven-year term by those portions of the country still under regime control, in a election where voting was restricted to Shiite Syrians only. The Sunni citizens of Syria remain violently beleaguered by their government whose military continues to drop barrel bombs into what they insist are rebel-held areas of Damascus and elsewhere in the region.

Smoke ascends after a Syrian military helicopter allegedly dropped one of two barrel bombs over the city of Daraya, southwest of the capital Damascus on ..

More than adequate explanation for the existence of Syrian refugees now numbering about 2.4-million, languishing in refugee camps internally and externally primarily in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees pleads with Western democracies to absorb greater numbers of Syrian refugees, and at the United Nations Hillel Neuer of UNWatch is asking some critical questions.

As, for example, while the Commission of Inquiry on Syria speaks of the country as a living hell because of mass murder, torture, rape, the regime's gassing of civilians with chemical weapons, UNESCO still elected the Syrian regime in 2011 - in an unanimous vote no less -- to its human rights committee. Only a few months ago the UN permitted the Assad regime a seat as a world judge on petititions submitted by human rights victims.

In February of 2014 Syria's news website, Juhayna, gleefully congratulated the regime for the fact that it was "unanimously re-elected as Rapporteur of the United Nations Special Committee on Decolonization". That very committee, Syria as its Rapporteur, debates the future of Gibraltar, the Falklands, Bermuda, French Polynesia and New Caledonia this week, in New York.

In Yarmouk, Palestinians starve to death because of a regime blockade that will not permit food and medical supplies to enter, but a Syrian representative is seated on a UN podium instructing liberal democracies such as Britain, France, the United States and New Zealand how they must treat populations under their purview to end "subjugation, domination and exploitation" of people.

And then, the United Nations Human Rights Council consolidated its wretched lunatic absurdity by adopting a resolution entitled "Human rights in the occupied Syrian Golan", which was drafted by Syria and which was described by a U.S. delegate as the height of insanity: "To consider such a resolution -- while the Syrian regime continues to slaughter its own citizens by the tens of thousands, exemplifies absurdity."

Yet the UN Commission of Inquiry reporting to the UN Human Rights Council stated that "a regional war in the Middle East draws ever closer", in light of Sunni insurgents fighting in Syria, advancing across Iraq to control areas bridging the Iraq-Syria frontier. Concern over the human rights blights being perpetrated by the Syrian regime, supported by the Islamic Republic of Iran and Russia has moved Britain and the United States to propose to make a pact with the devil.

Both countries are entertaining direct talks with Iran over the manner in which the situation in Iraq might be stabilized, even while the embattled country whose currently ruling Shia majority under Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's treatment of his Sunni minority in a carbon copy of sectarian treatment taking place in Syria, is leading both countries to being divided by religious sectarianism. Iran's concern over the invasion of Sunni extremist fanatics will in any event lead it to intervene.

It is in its own best interests to aid the Shia-led Iraqi government and it has sent into Iraq hundreds of Iranian troops for that very purpose. Britain, in announcing the re-opening of its embassy in Tehran, and the United States preparing to engage with Tehran over events playing out in Iraq, play handsomely into the conniving hands of a totalitarian Islamist regime whose nuclear weapons development should be of primary concern to all countries valuing peace and security whetever they are.

The USS George HW Bush has been ordered into the Persian Gulf, from which it could send manned aircraft to strike jihadist positions. Photograph: US navy/Reuters

The United States has dispatched its aircraft carrier USS George H.W. Bush to the Persian Gulf accompanied by a cruiser and a destroyer, both armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles. Iran has its own missiles which it can deploy should it wish to in defence of Baghdad. But the simple fact is, U.S.-trained Iraqi Shia military troops simply turned tail and ran when they were confronted by the ISIS extremists. The U.S. cannot consider blasting Iraqi cities with cruise missiles for civilian damage.

The ISIS militias tend to move stealthily within civilian populations; it is a specialty of terrorist groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and ISIS, to integrate themselves for cover into heavily populated areas as shields against attacks from their perceived enemies. When they lob off missiles at their enemies and the response is a counter-missile that kills civilians, the tactic employed is to blame their enemies for human rights abuses.

A carbon copy of what Syria manages to pull off with the help of the United Nations.

But President Barack Obama claims he believes in a "brief window to pursue diplomacy", anticipating that Shiite militias will stand their ground in Baghdad, and not evaporate in terror as they did in Mosul and Tikrit. Where, as usually happens in the Middle East and North Africa, munitions that the United States gives to those whom they support in the war against terror, end up in the hands of the terrorists.

The best-laid plans of mice and men....

United Nations Human Rights Council

"The UN Human Rights Council is a complex body. There are times when it does good things, there are times when it does bad things, and there are times when it just does nothing."
"This sounds like a comedy if it were not so tragic. When they sit at the council, they block action for victims in their countries. They block action for victims in other countries. And the election of these dictatorships confers an undue legitimacy that only strengthens the regime and undermines the morale of those who are behind bars or who are active for human rights."
Hillel Neuer, executive director, UN Watch

Egyptian women wave nationals flags and posters of Egypt’s Defense Minister, Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi during a pro-military rally marking the third anniversary of the 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, Saturday, Jan. 25, 2014. The anniversary of Egypt's 2011 uprising brought a violent display of the country's furious divisions Saturday, as giant crowds danced at government-backed rallies and security forces crushed demonstrations by rival Islamists and some secular activists.    Photograph by: Amr Nabil , AP

 

And then there's UN Watch, which once again mounted a conference in a centre right across the street from the UN's Palais des Nations, which is where the UN Human Rights Council meets. This would be the sixth annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. Present were dissidents and activists from North Korea, China, Pakistan, Iran, Egypt and a number of other places in the world not particularly known for their devoted adherence to human rights.

A number of international human rights groups commit with UN Watch to maintain a public focus on the UN's rights council and the members elected to head the council. Their inclusion in the proceedings of the Human Rights Council represents a degradation of the purpose of the council, but does ensure that those who are on its sanctified board are capable of manipulating events to their advantage.

Their own abuses won't be addressed, but they are focused on singling out one nation whose human rights scoreboard is diamond-pure in contrast to their own, but which is targeted time and time and again for vitriolic accusations without substance, and sanctions that make a complete mockery of the purported purpose and work of the Human Rights Council.

This year at the Summit for Human Rights and Democracy, Dalia Ziada, executive director of Cairo’s Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies, a co-founder of Egypt’s Justice Party and a leading Egyptian human rights activist, spoke of the winning battle against entrenched virulent sexism within her country.

Chen Guangcheng, the blind "barefoot lawyer" who managed incredibly to escape house arrest in China, finding refuge in the U.S. embassy in Beijing was present to speak of his trials and tribulations in his native country.

Biram Dah Abeid, founder of Mauritania's anti-slavery movement was there, as well as Ahn Myong Chol, a former prison guard in North Korea's gulag camps turned activist on his escape from North Korea, and Dhardon Sharling, an elected MP of Tibet's parliament in its Dharamsala, India exile, a leader of the Tibetan Women's Association.

Across the street from that gathering members of the UN Human Rights Council will gather. Members of the council include those stalwarts of human rights protection; China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Cuba, all of which were elected to the 47-member council last November. Joining, among other members, Pakistan, Maldives, Kazakhstan, Vietnam and Algeria.

During the November 2013 vote, 175 of the 193 UN member-states voted for inclusion of China. Russia's nomination resulted in an equal number of cast ballots. Half of the countries of the European Union cast their votes for China and Russia. Cuba earned 148 votes, and Saudi Arabia 140. Given the makeup of the council, it wouldn't have been anticipated to censure Russia for its anti-gay legislation.

It remains to be seen, with the fluid situation in Ukraine, how the council will respond.

Because of the recent horrendous attack by ten knife-wielding members of the Chinese Muslim minority in Kunming, any crackdown now on the Uighur community will most certainly be viewed with a great deal of sympathy, acknowledged as a protective feature of China's security apparatus, responding to the atrocity that killed 29 innocent civilians, and injured almost one hundred and fifty other unfortunates.

The council is set to focus on a country that has few defenders, though powerful China is most certainly one of them, and the growing influence of Iran, despite its imprisonments, torture, hangings and civil persecutions of gays, Baha'i and dissenters will scarcely be noticed; yet another supporter of North Korea. The now-stale UN inquiry into North Korea is due to be their focus. Newly released, the 400-page commission report charges the regime with:

"extermination, murder, enslavement, torture, imprisonment, rape, forced abortions and other sexual violence, persecution on political, religious, racial and gender grounds, the forcible transfer of populations, the enforced disappearance of persons and the inhumane act of knowingly causing prolonged starvation ... etcetera..."

With that startling pedigree of achievements, one might suppose that North Korea might be entitled to represent a constant target for condemnation and sanctions, but one would be wrong. It is always and perennially, another state that receives the most attention by far to be held out as a rogue state intent on human rights violations, and that state is Israel, which by the frequency of its perceived violations of human rights might be thought of as being in a league far surpassing that of North Korea in malevolent dysfunction.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is secure, protected by Russia and Iran, armed by both, alongside Hezbollah, in his pursuit of destroying the lives of Syria's Sunni population. Not too many denunciations coming his way. A decade ago the world was aghast at the news coming out of Darfur and Sudan's president, who led the ethnic cleansing atrocities with the help of mounted Arab attackers was denounced.

But the sentence handed down by the International Criminal Court labelling him guilty of war crimes, a rebuke along with an arrest warrant that the Arab League steadily ignores, enabling him to travel with few restraints or fears of arrest and transfer to the ICC to stand trial, is hardly worth the council's notice.