Disentangling UNRWA from Hamas

"[UNRWA's firings were a] small beginning. [The UN's] incoherent [position is notable]."

Firing people while refusing to acknowledge why reveals an institution still more interested in protecting itself and its Hamas-embedded workforce than in genuine neutrality or accountability."

Hillel Neuer, UN Watch

 

"Most of these alleged acts correspond to war crimes and, when perpetrated as part of a widespread or systematic attack, they would constitute crimes against humanity."

"There was a campaign to prevent that letter from going out. There were weeks of being bullied and deterred from writing it and telling me that everything in it was false."

"Some other special rapporteurs and working groups had wanted to sign on, but they also had been bullied by others not to sign on, and there was this concerted effort for this letter not to put on record some allegations that had been received."

UN special rapporteur on torture, Alice Edwards

The US Agency for International Development’s Office of Inspector General (USAID) submitted 101 more names for debarment or suspension based on their “participation” in the attack that killed 1,200 in Israel, including 46 US citizens. REUTERS

 

If there were any doubts over charges by Israeli intelligence that many UNRWA staff were members of Hamas, and that some of those members were present in southern Israel on 7 October 2023 when Hamas lead thousands of Palestinian terrorists on a deadly rampage through Israeli farming communities, towns and villages, and at a Nova Music Festival where thousands of music-loving young Israelis had gathered, and were subjected to mass rape, mutilation, murder and hostage-taking, that doubt was dispelled when UNRWA, given inescapable evidence, admitted that some of its hires were terrorists aligned with Hamas.

 

And then just a week ago the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine outright fired 70 of its employees, obviously in recognition of their deep ties to Gaza's terrorist groups. Canada's former Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper did not need such blatant evidence of UNRWA's connection to terrorism. Its record of UNRWA schools teaching children in Gaza from curricula depicting Jews as enemies and exposing the children to music, stories, television series and plays emphasizing the importance of pledging allegiance to the noble jihad of bombing, shooting, knifing the 'enemy' set them up for life as martyrs.

 

And with a direct and clear vision of the UNRWA mission to maintain Palestinians as victims and 'refugees' in perpetuity, the Harper Conservative government cut off Canada's contributions to that grotesquely compromised arm of the UN. When the Liberals returned to govern Canada 11 years ago, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reinstituted Canada's payments to UNRWA, and now that same Liberal government under Marc Carney has done the same.

 

A tunnel shaft was found in 2023, near a school run by Naji Abu Aziz. govextra.gov.il

 

In the immediate wake of the UNRWA firing announcement, Canada's minister of Foreign Affairs, Anita Anand announced $100 million of Canadian funding for the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which came to a total of $500 on top of earlier pledges. The latest donation, according to the minister was in support of the UN, Red Cross, Red Crescent and assistance-delivering NGOs in the region delivering aid to Palestine. The very 'State of Palestine' that PM Marc Carney joined the U.K., France, Spain and Australia in formally recognizing earlier in the year at the UN.

 

To add to what is well enough known of the waywardness of the UN regarding Israel, a special rapporteur for the UN has publicly revealed having been 'bullied' by colleagues for her efforts in attempting to reveal the scale of the atrocities that took place on October 7. An investigation by USAID earlier this month laid claim to 101 current or former UNRWA members -- principals, teachers, security personnel, attendants, psychosocial counsellors and medical professional being part of the October 7 massacre, which led to the 70 staff being fired.

 

At least 1,462 UNRWA employees in Gaza are members of Hamas, PIJ, or similar organizations—comprising nearly 12% of the agency's workforce in Gaza were verified up to this point

 

Yet UNRWA stated that "The dismissal of the staff is not part of a disciplinary process and does not constitute in any way a validation of the claims made against them", a statement which Hillel Neuer  of UN Watch made mincemeat of. And then the case of UN special rapporteur on torture, Alice Edwards, whose exploratory visit to Israel to document what had occurred on October 7, when everything she witnessed was laid out in a letter meant to be released to the public under the auspices of the United Nations, which she represented.

 

During that trip which Ms. Edwards personally funded, she witnessed evidence of murder, decapitation, torture, mutilation, the burning alive of people, sexual torture including gang rapes, mutilation of sexual organs, and hostage-taking. A severe backlash within the United Nations to the content of the letter was what resulted. Ultimately the adverse comments from her UN colleagues saw to it that "the letter shrank considerably", in content and impact. And that letter was then "transmitted" via the Permanent Mission of the State of Palestine in Geneva -- to Hamas. 

 

Mohammad Abu Itiwi has been employed by UNRWA since July 2022. On October 7th, 2023 Mohammad Abu Itiwi led the murderous attack on the bomb shelter on Route 232 in the area of Re'im in southern Israel in which **16 were murdered, 4 were kidnapped, and only 7 survived**.

 

"Our credibility depends on maintaining public confidence that human rights are applied universally."

"Where people perceive selectivity, double standards or political alignment, confidence is weakened."

"Politicization is not new to the United Nations; it reflects the divisions of the world it serves."

"No entity -- state or non-state -- should be left without scrutiny."

Alice Edwards, UN special rapporteur on torture 

Canadian Hypocrisy at the United Nations

Canada’s misleading denial that it nominated Iran to UN body addressing women’s rights & terror prevention   UN Watch

 

"There have been incorrect reports on social media about Canada’s position on the nomination of Iran to the United Nations Economic and Social Council Committee for Programme and Coordination – an advisory body with no decision-making role. Iran was nominated as part of the Asia-Pacific Group."

"Canada is not a member of the group and did not endorse or vote for this nomination. There was no vote, as per established procedures."

"Canada does not support Iran for positions of influence within the United Nations. We will continue to actively work with partners to counter Iranian candidacies."

Global Affairs, Canada  

 

"Canada’s foreign ministry made a misleading statement on X.com to mask the fact it allowed the nomination of the Islamic Republic of Iran to a UN committee that addresses critical issues including women’s rights and terrorism prevention — failing to object as the US did, and as Canada and EU states have done in the past."

"The fact is that Canada, as a member of the 54-nation UN Economic and Social Council, participated in the consensus nomination of the Islamic Republic of Iran to the UN Committee for Programme and Coordination on April 8, 2026."

"This committee deals with budget priorities and program coordination on critical issues, and will meet soon, May 14-21, to address women’s rights, human rights, and terrorism prevention."

"At a minimum, Canada should have taken the floor to object that it is wrong to nominate a regime that only months ago massacred thousands of protesters, and that brutally oppresses women, tortures political prisoners, and systematically violates basic human rights."

"This is exactly what the United States did in that meeting. It was the only country that formally objected and disassociated itself from the consensus decision, citing Iran’s appalling record on women’s rights.

Canada and other Western democracies, however, remained silent and allowed the consensus to pass in ECOSOC, a body of which Canada is a member."

UN Watch

 

"The United States disassociates from consensus on the nomination of Iran to the Committee on Program and Co-ordination."

"The regime threatens its neighbours and has for decades infringed on the Iranian people's ability to exercise their basic human rights."

"Due to these and other concerns, we believe Iran is unfit to serve on a body advising member states on program and budgetary matters."

U.S. Ambassador Dan Negrea 

The Security Council chamber at the United Nation in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt /Getty Images

 

Canada obligingly assisted  in the approval of a motion for the Islamic Republic of Iran -- that would be the Iranian regime that just a few months earlier responded to nation-wide protests against the regime by dispatching police, the IRGC and Basij to violently disband the protests by all and any means, leading to the killing of an estimated 30,000 Iranians and the arrests and death sentences of untold numbers of 'enemies of the Islamic Republic' -- to a position on the UN's Committee for Program and Coordination.

 

Iranian-Canadians who desperately wish for the Ayatollah-led, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-enforced Republic to fall, and yearn for the freedom from oppression that would mean for their families in Iran, would have reacted to the news of this incredible betrayal with disbelief. While at the same time, the infiltrated members of the regime and the IRGC that have made a home for themselves in Canada would have beamed with pleasure. Just as Hamas has on occasion congratulated the ruling Liberal government for some of its decisions, now the Iranian regime was given the same opportunity.

 

Officially, for internal consumption, the Liberal government of prime minister Mark Carney denied any such reports; that they did no such thing. The actual facts belie that assertion. Canada gave aid and comfort to a regime under the duress of a conflict brought by the State of Israel and the U.S. military launching an aerial war on the regime, its military, the IRGC, their weapons depots and rocket launchers and nuclear sites. While the Iranian regime presents a distinct danger with its nuclear ambitions and its sponsorship of terrorist groups to the world at large and the Middle East in particular, Canada's government calls for a ceasefire so the regime can survive.

 

Canada's decision at the April 8 meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council enables Iran to have an advisory and oversight role on programs as diverse as gender equality and terrorism prevention, as well as 'peaceful uses of outer space'. Global Affairs Canada's insistence that Canada's role in the event has been misunderstood, is an evasive and shameful tactic in a bid to shield the government from the shame and blame it most certainly deserves for betraying the most elemental foundations of human rights against tyrannical rule. 

 

Official video from the UN Economic and Social Council, most recently chaired by Bob Rae, Canada's ambassador to the UN, showed an official chairing a plenary session of the council where the Islamic Republic of Iran was included on a list of countries set to be appointed to a three-year term on the Committee for Program and Co-ordination. With no objections from the representatives of the assembled countries, the officiating individual bangs a gavel and declares: "It is so decided". 

 

And Canada helped in that decision; not a word of doubt expressed of the inappropriateness of a corrupt, terror-promoting, nation known for persecuting its own people -- much less its violence visited upon Iranian women who dare to oppose strictures placed upon their most basic of human rights -- sitting on such a committee from Canada.

 

Screenshot from a UN live stream showing the precise moment that a plenary session of the UN Economic and Social Council approved the nomination of the Islamic Republic of Iran to a UN oversight committee. Photo by UN

 

Canada Going Along to Get Along with Iran in the UN on Human Rights

"From the General Assembly resolution 3379 in 1975, which called Zionism 'a form of racism'; through the 2001 Durban human rights conference; to the 2003 election of a representative of Libya's Col. Qaddafi as chair of the Human Rights Council, the UN's veneer of legitimacy has worn thin."

John Ivison, journalist, National Post 

The Security Council chamber at the United Nations in New York City. Photo by Spencer Platt /Getty Images

 

Once a year the UN's Economic and Social Council's [ECOSOC], 54 members which centrally coordinates the UN's work on economic, social and environmental issues, nominates a list of countries to join the UN Committee for Program and Coordination [CPC], which are generally confirmed. Currently the ECOSOC membership includes the United States, Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom and Canada, among many other countries. A week ago nominations for the CPC came up for debate. The Islamic Republic of Iran was one of those nominated. And the United States was the only ECOSOC member to dissent over its nomination, declaring Iran unfit to sit on the CPC.

 

In another month the CPC will take to reviewing United Nations programs that address gender equality, disarmament and terrorism prevention. Certainly, Iran knows a great deal about all three issues. And as a world-leader in abuse of women's rights, and the ultimate resistor-country to disarmament, as well as the globally-acknowledged leader in the promotion of terrorism, it could conceivably act as a poster for all that has gone wrong in human rights under its theistic rule. Other than that, what could it possibly add of any value to those items? 

 

Canada was one of the ECOSOC members, along with Germany, France, Spain, and the U.K. to rubber-stamp the Iranian nomination to the CPC -- and just coincidentally Iran had been elected to the group previously, in 2014, 2017, 2020 and 2023, as astonishingly corrupt as that might appear to any befuddled mind that continues to cling to the belief that the United Nations is a global institution whose mandate is one of promoting human rights and world peace. 

 

United Nations Headquarters   Image courtesy of Nils Huenerfuerst on Unsplash

 

The following Tuesday in the House of Commons, Opposition Conservative MP Michael Chong, foreign affairs critic, questioned Canada's supine agreement for Iran. Foreign Affairs minister Anita Anand informed  him that there was nothing Canada could do: "As the position was uncontested, there was no opportunity for a vote", she explained. But the opportunity was there to object and Canada failed that metric of responsibility. "Canada will continue to work closely with partners to actively counter Iran's candidacies in UN bodies and will do so on all occasions", she emphasized, having just done otherwise. 

 

But then, of course, she was only relying on the outstanding leadership example of the leader of the Liberal party, Prime Minister Mark Carney, to lead the way on sanctimonious cynicism, as when in January his speech in Davos included this humdinger: "There is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety. It won't."

 

According to Canadian lawyer Hillel Neuer of UN Watch in Geneva, Anand's position  was "misleading". Canada could have acted with principle, but failed to. It had the opportunity to force a vote on the nominations, at the very least could have done what the U.S. did, to disassociate from the consensus that rubber-stamped Iran's committee membership, once again. The U.S. ambassador to ECOSOC made that abundantly clear, and included Cuba and Nicaragua. 

"To be clear, Canada joined the consensus in endorsing Iran and others, and it was not obliged to."

"I would say this is typical. Much of what happens at the UN is very cynical. If you want to be principled, you are going to be very busy and it is going to be unpleasant."

"Diplomats believe it is good to get along with as many countries as possible It is much easier to go along to get along."

"[Placing] serial abusers [at the helm of human rights at the UN is] like putting Al Capone in charge of fighting organized crime".

Hillel Neuer, UN Watch 

Iran secures UN role with backing from UK, France, Canada, Australia as US stands alone

 

REPLACE UNRWA!

"There's a substantial difference. More than fifteen countries representing more than half a billion dollars have frozen their funding." 

"In our ten years of documenting this, there's not one instance where one of the friends on Facebook, their peers -- most of whom are fellow UNRWA staff, teachers, employees -- said, 'Whoah, Ahmed, I'm shocked that you just glorified Hitler and that you praised the terrorist attack."

"There's not one instance of that. It's the complete opposite, and we've documented that in videos where they liked it, endorsed it, praised it."

"This line about twelve bad apples is just so preposterous."

Hillel Neuer, executive director, UN Watch

"[UNRWA took] the recent allegations very, very seriously."

"There's about two million people who depend on our assistance. We have 150 shelters that have become home to a million people who have been displaced."

"We bring food and medicine; we bring medical teams."

Juliette Touma, spokeswoman, United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East

 

Since October 7's horrors of unrelieved barbarity was visited on the civilian population of Israel; Jews mostly but also Bedouin and foreign farm workers, a sadistic savagery visited upon infants, children, women, men and the elderly, fully revealed in all its macabre, gory details by videos that the perpetrators themselves proudly took of tormenting, mutilating, raping, killing, no one can be ignorant of the Hamas marauders pogrom on southern Israel across the border from Gaza, nor the plight of the abductees taken into Gaza as hostages.

 

Hillel Neuer, a practising lawyer specializing in international law became aware of an opening at UN Watch in 2004. Born in Canada, he attended McGill Law School and became an acolyte of the university's human rights program led by Irwin Cotler who served as Canada's Attorney General under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Paul Martin. Mr. Cotler's passion for human rights ignited a similar flame in Mr. Neuer.

 

"I very much wanted to follow in his path and be a defender of human rights and [to] advocate for the Jewish people, the State of Israel, and to defend their rights", he said in a recent interview. That is precisely what he does, has been doing for two decades, revealing the hypocrisy within the international body that has become his focus in life. Where the world's most obvious and criminal regimes have sway and head UN positions on human rights; the most serious violators of human rights sitting in judgement on nations with impeccable human rights records.

 

Mr. Neuer's critiques over continual, unending sanctions against one tiny country among the 193 nations of the world highlight the absurdity of a world body dedicated to justice, human rights and peace directing its ire against a nation that is as close to upholding those values as any other upstanding member of the United Nations, highlighting the power of blocs like the unaligned nations and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. Two of the world's most blatant human rights abusers, Russia and China, sit on the five-nation Security Council. 

In February on the 20th anniversary of Hillel Neuer's leadership of UN Watch one speech, "Where are  your Jews?" in a challenge to Arab UN delegations to address the evacuation of ancestral Jewish communities from their ancient homelands within the Arab nations of the Middle East was seminal, right-to-the-point, and went unanswered. 

 

 

Weeks following the Hamas invasion of Israel a report documenting close to two dozen UNRWA staffers celebrating the atrocities on social media was released by UN Watch. In January an analysis of a group on the Telegram social media site that features thousands of UNRWA educators in Gaza, found widespread support for terrorism. "May Allah grant them victory" wrote  Shatha Husam Al Nawajha responding to a teaching colleague's comment that Hamas operatives were "breastfed Jihad with their mothers' milk".

Following the 1948 Arab-Israel war when joint Arab-nation militaries attacked the nascent Jewish state and were defeated, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency was created to look after the needs of the estimated 750,000 Palestinians who fled the contested area. At the very same time, with the creation of the State of Israel, Arabized Jews who had lived for millennia in the Middle East and North Africa were expelled, their belongings transferred to state ownership.

While the exiled Jews found refuge in Israel or in a wider diaspora, the Palestinians were placed in refugee camps in Arab countries that refused them citizenship, leaving them to live in squalor. They were meant to represent a living, breathing sore on the body politic in the claim that Israel was responsible for their plight; a people who had been promised by those Arab states that they could return once Israel was annihilated, neither of which aspiration met with reality.

Ever since, in the 70 years that followed, the world has regarded the Palestinians, through the auspices of the United Nations, as refugees, a status of permanency never before encountered with the many huge pools of refugees caused by civil wars, nation-to-nation conflict, natural disasters or any other globally unsettling cause. The leaders infuse them with rage over the creation of a Jewish state in an ancestral Judaic geography, inciting Palestinians to 'resist' the 'oppression' of a Jewish presence with unadulterated lethal violence.

UNRWA, conceived with the purpose of maintaining Palestinian 'refugees', nurtured their belief that they would some day return. In fact, many never left, and today, totalling over two million, they are citizens of the State of Israel; those who fled or were forced out in 1948 whose issue -- children and grandchildren are now counted among the 'refugees' will never return -- now total 7 million; an absurdity in and of itself.

UN Watch's findings, following the news that ten percent of UNRWA's workforce is tied to Palestinian terrorist groups were presented in January in testimony before the U.S. Congress by Mr. Neuer. Prior to that an Israeli intelligence dossier revealed that 13 UNRWA members comprised of seven primary and secondary school teachers along with math and Arabic instructors, had taken part personally in the October 7 massacres in Israel.

Revelations that electrified major donors of the UNRWA program, including its largest donor, the United States. Among others, Australia, Canada, Japan, Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom saw fit to suspend their funding of the UN agency. Mr. Neuer predicts that funding will be reinstated by UNRWA donors even with promised reforms neglected. UNRWA, given its disastrous performance, he feels, will be dismantled, its mandate replaced by other bodies of the UN.

Enough is enough. UNRWA must be dissolved and replaced. UN Watch

Another United Nations Human Rights Triumph

"It's scandalous that the United Nations chose a country that has beheaded more people this year [as capital punishment for criminal offences against the state] than ISIS, to be head of a key human rights panel. Petro-dollars and politics have trumped human rights."
"Saudi Arabia has arguably the worst record in the world when it comes to religious freedom and women's rights, and continues to imprison the innocent blogger Raif Badawi."
This UN appointment is like making a pyromaniac into the town fire chief, and underscores the credibility deficit of a human rights council that already counts Russia, Cuba, China, Qatar and Venezuela among its elected members." 
“The UN often describes these experts as the ‘crown jewels’ of its Human Rights Council, yet the world body only undermines their legitimacy by picking a fundamentalist theocracy that oppresses women and minorities to preside over the experts’ appointment.”
UN Watch executive director Hillel Neuer

The principle of universality of human rights is the cornerstone of international human rights law. This principle, as first emphasized in the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948, has been reiterated in numerous international human rights conventions, declarations, and resolutions. The 1993 Vienna World Conference on Human Rights, for example, noted that it is the duty of States to promote and protect all human rights and fundamental freedoms, regardless of their political, economic and cultural systems.

UN Watch reported that the United Nations saw fit to choose Saudi Arabia to head a five-member group of ambassadors, the Consultative Group, given the power to select applicants globally for some 77 positions to deal with country-specific and thematic human rights mandates. So the issue is the absurdity of countries well known to be abusive to their own populations' human rights through tyrannical and oppressive leadership, sitting in judgement on the world's human rights abusers. That old adage that it takes a thief to catch a thief possibly motivates the United Nations. 

On the other hand, the presence of Saudi Arabia and other countries whose record on respect of human rights along with their oppressive tyrannies of their own populations guarantees that they will not go out of their way to bring opprobrium to those countries which align with them politically, and support them in their positions. What they will do and have done and continue to do is to selectively turn their attention to the least human-rights offending country in a purely political move to sideline and slander Israel whose human rights record could serve as a standard globally.

But of course, it is the lobbying of support groups like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation and the Non-aligned Movement within the United Nations that influence all such decision-making. The UN Human Rights Council whose membership is half comprised of democratic nations like France who know what human rights violations look like and others like China, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Russian Federation and Morocco, whose versions of human rights look nothing like the declaration above, makes a mockery of the very issue they are supposed to uphold.

Saudi Arabia's envoy to the UN Human Rights Council, Faisal Trad, was appointed to chair a special appointments panel in the 30th session of the council. Diplomats in Geneva took the precaution of not advertising their decision in the full knowledge of the corruption of the meaning of upholding human rights when the decision was made to elect the Saudi ambassador. Mr. Neuer of UN Watch suspects that this represents an arrangement that prevented the Kingdom's bid to preside over the 47-nation council in exchange for compliance for the lesser position.

Left: Faisal Trad, Saudi Arabia’s ambassador in Geneva, has been elected Chair of the UN Human Rights Council panel that appoints independent experts. Right: Michael Møller, Director-General of the United Nations Office at Geneva.

Riyadh originally sought the council presidency, which was then followed by a protest led by UN Watch, to alert the international community to the proceedings whereby the misogynistic, backward, rigidly Islamist, Sunni jihad-supporting Saudi Arabia would head the UN's Human Rights Council. Because the United States has an amicable relationship with the Kingdom, reflecting its oil reserves and the power and influences that it occupies as a result, on the world stage, there was no protest from U.S. officials.

“We cannot forget that the U.S. and the EU refused to utter a word of protest when we urged them, together with Saudi dissidents, to oppose the monarchy’s election in 2013. It’s a sad comment on our world that oil continues to trump basic human rights principles.”
“It’s bad enough that Saudi Arabia is a member of the council, but for the UN to go and name the regime as chair of a key panel only pours salt in the wounds for dissidents languishing in Saudi prisons, like human rights activist Raif Badawi.”
Hillel Neuer, UN Watch

In this instance as in many others, the United Nations' principles are seen to be completely morally bankrupt; in April, the EU and the US did nothing whatever to stop the fundamentalist Islamic Republic of Iran from gaining a prominent post on UN Women, the world agency for women’s equality and empowerment. The very concept of the Iranian Republic sitting on a UN body whose purpose is to uphold women's rights demonstrates the utter lack of trust any democratic nation can continue to place in the functions of the United Nations.


Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, winner of the 2015 Geneva Summit Women’s Rights Award

"[The election represents] an insult to many Iranian women who are suffering from the lack of equal rights.”
“The existing laws in my country do not allow me as a woman to walk in public without wearing the veil; I, as a woman, do not even have the freedom to choose my own dress. The laws of the Islamic Republic of Iran do not allow me to travel or get an education without the permission of my husband. I cannot even get married without the permission of my father.”
“The laws in my country do not allow women to sing solo as our voice allegedly runs the risk of provoking men. Under laws of the Islamic Republic, my share of inheritance is half of that of my male relatives. Under the laws of the Islamic Republic, just last year more than 18,000 women ended up in court for being ‘badly veiled.’ UN Women was created by the United Nations as a body for gender equality and for the empowerment of women. If so, isn’t it an insult to women to give the leadership role to those governments that oppress their own women?”

Is anyone even listening?

UN Watch BriefingLatest from the United Nations  Vol. 495 |  June 25, 2014

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U.N. Dictatorships Fail to Stop Critique of Inaction on Human Rights Iran, Cuba, China, Pakistan, Egypt, Venezuela Urge Silencing of UN Watch                                         Click for Video The 2014 Catalog of U.N. Inaction on Global Human Rights Abuses Testimony before U.N. Human Rights Council, delivered by UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer, 19 June 2014, in the debate under Agenda Item 3, "Promotion and Protection of All Human Rights"  Thank you, Mr. President. The members of this Council have been mandated by the international community to protect victims of human rights violations around the world. Is the Council living up to its mandate? Let us consider the most fundamental of all human rights—the right to life—by examining what has happened in the world, over the past 12 months: July 2013, Turkey: Doctors report that in the Gezi Park protests, police killed 5 people, wounded 8,163 and used chemical riot control weapons against more than 10,000. August, Egypt: Authorities crush the sit-in held by supporters of deposed president Morsi, killing 1,000 people. September, Iran: One month after President Rouhani’s inauguration, amid promises of human rights reforms, Iranian officials ignore UN appeals, and hang a record 50 individuals. Did the council respond with any resolutions, urgent debates, or inquiries to determine the facts, and hold perpetrators accountable? No. Its response was silence. October, Afghanistan: Terrorists bomb a minibus, killing 14 women and a child who were on their way to celebrate a wedding. November, Libya: Militia kill 31 during protests in Tripoli, injuring 235. December, South Sudan: BBC reports mass ethnic killings, including 200 shot by security forces. January, Pakistan: 236 civilians killed by terrorist attacks. This Council’s response? Silence. February, Ukraine: Police kill 75 protesters in Kiev’s Independence Square. March, China: Activist Cao Shunli, who was arrested for trying to travel to Geneva and participate this Council, mysteriously dies in prison. April, Iraq: 750 Iraqis killed, 1,541 injured by terrorism and other violence. May, Venezuela: Troops arrest 243 student protesters and kill one of their own, bringing the death toll to 42 since the start of the opposition protests. Finally, June -- a few weeks ago -- in Nigeria: Boko Haram massacres 200 civilians while still holding the 276 school girls it abducted in April… President: Please can I ask you to wait? There is a point of order from Venezuela...  Venezuela: I think this speaker is out of order and I would ask that he confine himself to the agenda items under consideration. He’s also mentioned my country and I will take the floor later on that... France: France attaches great importance to the voice of civil society which should be able to speak freely in the work of the council and contribute to her work... USA: Along the same lines as my colleague from France, we firmly believe that NGOs and civil society be heard... What the speaker was saying is consistent with the topic of this agenda item so we urge you to let him continue. Cuba: I am looking at the agenda, [and] we were never talking about countries as far as I understood. We do not understand why the NGO has been spending its entire time talking about country situations. This is not the agenda item for this... Ireland: We do believe that the speaker was speaking to the agenda item by providing concrete examples linked to those thematic issues and therefore we would kindly ask that he be allowed to continue. China:  China requests the president to make a ruling to end the speech by this NGO.  Canada: Canada, much like others who have spoke before us, firmly believes that accredited NGOs must be permitted to speak at the council... It is essential to respect the council’s emphasis on open dialogue. This is a question of freedom of speech... The statements that were being made were pertinent to the agenda items that were being discussed. Norway: This statement should not be interrupted because an NGO mentions concrete examples of human rights violations so we therefore ask you to let the speaker continue the statement. Iran: My delegation would like to support the point of order made by the delegation of the Venezuela. Pakistan: My delegation also supports the point of order raised by Venezuela. It is important that we should respect and adhere to the rules of procedure and discuss relevant issues under the relevant agenda items. United Kingdom: The UK supports the right of accredited NGOs to speak at the UN Human Rights Council... We request that the speaker be allowed to finish their statement. Egypt: We just want to also add our voice to other speakers who spoke about the appropriateness of speaking under the right agenda item. We don’t believe that what was mentioned in the statement of the NGO here relates to our discussion.. there are certain rules and regulations for this council all of us have to stick to. President:  What I can say is that already I’ve noted that you agree that NGOs do have the right to speak. The issues relating to human rights don’t take place in an abstract context... If a speaker were to refer to relevant human rights issues under the agenda item under consideration, it is possible that the speaker may give examples or illustrations from specific examples from specific situations... I give the floor back to the speaker. UN Watch (Hillel Neuer): Thank you. Mr. President, if it “inappropriate” to speak about the urgent need to take action for victims of human rights violations around the world, then why are we here?