ANNE BAYEFSKY:THE UN AND THE GOLDSTONE REPORT-WHERE DOES IT GO FROM HERE?
By Anne Bayefsky
The namesake of the infamous U.N. Goldstone Report, Richard Goldstone, suddenly confessed this past weekend in an article published by The Washington Post, that he had made a mistake. In September 2009, he and his U.N.-sponsored team made the wild accusation that Israel set out to murder civilians in the Gaza war rather than protect its own citizens from an unremitting genocidal campaign prosecuted for years by Palestinian terrorists.
Despite Richard Goldstone’s thirteenth hour confession, his diabolical legacy demonizing the state of Israel lives on at the United Nations. The body that created the Goldstone inquiry in 2009, the Human Rights Council, and the various entities that the Council has directed to implement his blood libel, have no intention of backing down. The facts be damned.
As of today, the U.N. system expects the Goldstone Report to be implemented as is. Four different follow-up activities are still percolating. These requirements emanate from a Human Rights Council resolution on the report that was adopted just a few weeks ago on March 25. Goldstone published his confession only after the Council once again pushed forward the implementation of his report – timing he would have known well in advance.
First, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights is required to “submit a progress report on the implementation of the [Goldstone report]…to the Human Rights Council at its 18th session of September 2011.” High Commissioner Navi Pillay will no doubt do everything in her power to keep it alive, since she was a main figure in sponsoring the report in the first place.
Prior to the decision of the Council in January 2009 to create the Goldstone inquiry, she first declared Israel guilty of “egregious violations of human rights” and then demanded “credible, independent, and transparent investigations … to identify violations and establish responsibilities.” After the report was issued Pillay became Goldstone’s lead champion, repeating dozens of times the words she first wrote in the Huffington Post shortly after the report’s release: “I lend my full support to Justice Goldstone’s report and its recommendations.”
Pillay event took the report to the U.N. Security Council. On July 7, 2010 Pillay was asked by the Council to address the issue of “situations where the protection of civilians has been and remains of great concern.” After noting the millions affected by atrocities around the world, the only plea she made in her statement to the Security Council on behalf of the peoples of this earth was: “I urge the Security Council to support the recommendations of the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” a.k.a., the Goldstone report.
Pillay, a native of Durban, South Africa who is similarly a lead champion of the Durban Declaration despite its deep-seated anti-semitism, is inextricably connected to the Goldstone report and its perjury against the Jewish state.
Second, the Secretary-General is required “to present a comprehensive report on the progress made in the implementation of the recommendations of the [Goldstone Report]…by all concerned parties, including United Nations bodies… to the Council at its 18th session of September 2011.” This mandate means the U.N. secretariat is required to ask large numbers of U.N. bodies for a report on what they in turn have done to implement the Goldstone Report, thus further spreading the report’s tentacles across the U.N. system.
Third, the Human Rights Council has “decide[d] to follow up on the implementation of the [Goldstone Report] …at its 19th session of March 2012.” So the Goldstone Report will come back to the Council next year.
Fourth, the Human Rights Council has asked the General Assembly to become more involved in promoting the report; it “urges the Assembly to submit that [Goldstone] report to the Security Council for its consideration and appropriate action, including consideration of referral of the situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court…”
Truth and falsehood have never been reliable attributes of the U.N. human rights system. And undoubtedly, the U.N. Human Rights Council – which has expended so much effort to create and keep this scurrilous and bogus report alive – will not skip a beat. The Obama administration has run out of excuses for remaining on the Council and forcing Americans to pay for it.
Anne Bayefsky is a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute and director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2011/04/05/united-nations-goldstone-report-does/#ixzz1IgrBaLIk
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