Geneva has many secrets, and now there is one more. Diplomats, activists and journalists close to the UN Human Rights Council have been covering up the fact that president Luis Alfonso de Alba missed the legal deadline for concluding the mandated one year of negotiations on his proposed reform package.The deadline was June 18 at midnight, and he missed it. Missed, to be sure, by only a couple of minutes at most, but unmistakably missed. So why are so many writing that the president had just made the deadline, when in fact he had just missed it? The issue may seem relatively small compared to the scandal of the adoption that never was (of that we shall write soon), but it reveals a troubling mindset among those who swear fealty to institutions of the rule of law.
For possibly the first time in the history of the United Nations, one of its major bodies has ruled that a consensus vote was achieved even though one of its members—one with a particular reputation for honesty—insists it never gave consent, much less even saw the text that was voted upon. In its most aggressive Orwellian move to date, the UN Human Rights Council declared that this week’s package of new procedures was adopted by consensus, on the night of June 18. (In fact, the rushed declaration of council president Luis Alfonso de Alba was made past the legal midnight deadline, already in the early moments of June 19, but that’s another story.) Canada’s challenge to this interpretation was then overruled by the Council, 46 members to 1, the lone vote being Canada’s. Sure enough, speeches by Council members today and yesterday are crowing about the fact that the newly formed body was born in the purity of consensus. And so the official record will reflect.
Dictators Fidel Castro of Cuba and Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus will be celebrating the UN Human Rights Council’s likely adoption tomorrow of a reform package that will see both regimes dropped from a blacklist, while Israel is placed under permanent indictment.
Contrary to all the promises of reform issued last year, the proposal released today by Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba targets Israel for permanent indictment under a special agenda item: “Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,” which includes “Human rights violations and implications of the Israeli occupation of Palestine and other occupied Arab territories”; and “Right to self-determination of the Palestinian people.” No other situation in the world is singled out — not genocide in Sudan, not child slavery in China, nor the persecution of democracy dissidents in Egypt and elsewhere. Moreover, the council will entrench its one-sided investigative mandate of “Israeli violations of international law”—the only one not subject to regular review after a set term—by renewing it “until the end of the occupation.”
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