The United Kingdom’s delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) announced Friday that it will vote against all future anti-Israel resolutions if the council persists in its disproportionate focus on the Jewish state.
Last week’s UNHRC resolutions concerning Israel were imbalanced and unfair, the British diplomatic team said. While Her Majesty’s government itself had criticisms for the Israeli government, they noted that the world “must also recognise the continuing terrorism, incitement and violence that Israel faces….Neither ‘terrorism’ nor ‘incitement’ were a focus of this week’s Council discussions and resolutions. This is not acceptable.”
The statement also blasted the council’s disproportionate focus on Israel:
Our enduring commitment to the universality of rights is also our source of enduring disappointment with the Council’s bias against Israel. Israel is a population of eight million in a world of seven billion. Yet since its foundation, the Human Rights Council has adopted 135 country-specific resolutions; 68 of which against Israel. Justice is blind and impartial. This selective focus on Israel is neither.
Israel is the only country permanently on the Human Rights Council’s agenda. Indeed when the Council voted to include Israel as a permanent item in 2007 – the so-called agenda Item 7 – it was Ban Ki Moon who expressed his deep disappointment “given the range and scope of allegations of human rights violations throughout the world.”
The British team took particular issue with a resolution condemning Israel for its occupation of the Golan Heights, observing, “Syria’s regime butchers and murders its people on a daily basis. But it is not Syria that is a permanent standing item on the Council’s agenda; it is Israel.” While maintaining its support for an eventual Israeli withdrawal from the Golan, the statement asserted, “we cannot accept the perverse message sent out by a Syria Golan resolution that singles out Israel, as Asad continues to slaughter the Syrian people.”
“So today we are putting the Human Rights Council on notice,” the statement concluded. “If things do not change, in the future we will adopt a policy of voting against all resolutions concerning Israel’s conduct in the Occupied Syrian and Palestinian Territories.”
Former Israeli ambassador to the UN Ron Prosor called on Western democracies to take a stand against anti-Israel bias at the UN in an op-ed in Newsweek last week. He urged other democracies – specifically including the UK – to follow the U.S.’s lead and pressure the UN “to shed its reputation for bloated, ludicrous hypocrisy and restore trust and credibility to international institutions.”
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned the UNHRC two weeks ago that the U.S. would withdraw from the organization if it did not reform.
[Photo: Tom Page / YouTube ]