The UN Human Rights Council Has No Shame ~ Diane B. Kunz ~ June 1, 2021 A government pledges in its founding document to exterminate the citizens of its neighboring country through a holy war. The leaders proclaim that they will never stop fighting until they have eliminated the “most despicable and contemptible nation to crawl up on the face of the earth.” In furtherance of these goals it has launched tens of thousands of rockets against civilians located deep within the neighboring state, far away from any military installations. Surely the United Nations, a world body dedicated to furthering peace and suppressing “acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace” would condemn that government, either in the General Assembly or in its Human Rights Council. Indeed, the UNHRC did pass a resolution and it did lay the blame in an unequivocal manner on the government. But the UNHRC resolution passed on May 29 was aimed not at the Hamas government of Gaza, whose national charter I quoted above, but against Israel, whose citizens, children, men, and women alike withstood 4,300 rockets attacking every part of its country in less than a two-week period. (UNHRC Resolution A/HRC/S-30/L.1) There is no legal, factual, or moral justification for what the UNHRC did. The Resolution’s ostensible aim is to assess Israel’s actions “ in accordance with applicable national procedures and international obligations and standards, that there is a clear risk that they could be used to commit or facilitate serious crimes. violations or abuses of international human rights law or serious violations of international humanitarian law.” The irony is that if the UNHRC members or anyone else objectively judged Israel according to these precepts, Israel would be found not guilty of the charges. Let’s look at the evidence. Article 51 of the UN Charter recognizes the “inherent right of individual or collective self-defense” of every member nation. Israel’s actions during last month’s eleven-day conflict fit squarely within this article. Constantly quoted during the UNHRC and other debates was the principle embodied in Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions that it is a war crime to risk civilian casualties that would be ”excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” (Add. Prot. I, Art.51, §4) But according to Matthias Schmale, the head of the Palestinian refugee organization (UNRWA), clearly an unbiased source, the Israeli attacks on Gazan military targets were “precise” and “sophisticated” with minimal civilian loss of life, not excessive casualties. Moreover, Additional Protocol I, which neither the United States nor Israel has ratified, forbids the use of civilians to “render certain points or areas immune from military operations, in particular in attempts to shield military objectives from attacks or to shield, favour or impede military operations.” (Add. Prot. I, Art.51, §7) Yet this is precisely what Hamas has done in Gaza, planting its rocket launchers, military equipment and installations in schools, hospitals and in the same building as the AP news headquarters in Gaza. In a just world, Hamas’ egregious violations of the provision against using civilian locations as shields would be sufficient to put it, not Israel, in the dock. But the UN is concerned neither with peace nor with justice. The UNHRC resolution is only the latest action that discredits multilateralism in general, and the UN in particular. The UNHRC itself is only fifteen years old. Its predecessor, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, was disbanded because of its disproportionate obsession with Israel and its failure to deal with genuine human rights abuses committed by countries around the world. For its part, the UN General Assembly during its truncated 2020 session passed 17 resolutions condemning Israel, out of a grand total of 23 resolutions. It failed to rebuke egregious human rights violations by China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, Ethiopia, Yemen, Sudan, among others. In November 1975 Israeli diplomat and Foreign Minister Abba Eban writing about “Zionism and Racism at the UN” (NYTimes, 11/03/1975) said that the UN was “on the way to becoming the world center of Anti-Semitism.” Last week it took a giant step closer toward that perfidious goal.