Yesterday was the 70th anniversary of the 1948 signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Genocide Conventions, a date celebrated by the UN as “Human-Rights Day.” As Gerald Steinberg notes, the United Nations—which last week failed to pass a resolution condemning Hamas—has an abysmal record when it comes to protecting human rights, despite its “self-congratulatory rhetoric.”
Ignoring most of the victims [of genuine persecution] around the world, the agenda of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva continues to be controlled by some of the worst violators, including Cuba, Russia, Venezuela, Saudi Arabia (a major offender long before the murder of Jamal Khashoggi), Egypt, and China. The member-states and UN officials they appoint routinely exploit the rhetoric of international law to deflect attention from their own behavior, and obsessively target the Jewish state. Syrian and Iranian diplomats take the floor to make poisonous accusations against Israel, while their governments make genocidal threats that turn the 1948 Universal Declaration into a mockery.
This year, the council voted again to conduct a pseudo-investigation of Israel, this time over the claims of excessive force and war crimes during the Hamas-orchestrated violent “Grand Return March” incidents along the Gaza border with Israel. Like the infamous, and eventually discredited, Goldstone Report [accusing Israel of fictitious war crimes in its 2008-2009 conflict with Hamas], the one-sided results of this investigation were decided before the commission members were named. . . .
[To make things worse], powerful non-governmental organizations (NGOs) claiming to promote human rights, such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, promote [instead] the agendas of the dictatorships they are ostensibly monitoring. At the meetings, these NGOs routinely take the floor to repeat unsupported claims and denounce democracies, reinforcing the attacks against Israel with particular relish.
Read more on Jerusalem Post: https://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Human-Rights-Day-nothing-to-celebrate-573706