Expert: UN could 'bury' Goldstone report

Ma'an
A year after Israel's assault on Gaza, bureaucratic wrangling is threatening to "bury" a UN report that accuses Israel and Palestinian militias of committing war crimes, a UN expert on the issue said on Wednesday.

Richard Falk, the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories, made these remarks ahead of a vote on Friday in which the UN General Assembly is expected to give Israeli and Palestinian authorities five more months to investigate war crimes charges.

“I think its part of the wider effort basically to bury the recommendations of the Goldstone report, unnecessarily delaying the implementation of its recommendations,” Falk told Ma’an in a phone interview.

As time passes, Falk said, the UN is less likely to hold accused war criminals accountable. The delays “remove the reality of what happened in Gaza from the collective memory of world society.”

Falk was referring to a UN-mandated fact-finding mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone into Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009. More than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died in the conflict. A renowned judge who was the lead international prosecutor in war crimes tribunals in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia, Goldstone and his team visited Gaza, interviewed hundreds of witnesses and collected thousands of pages of documents in compiling the report. Israel refused to comply with the investigation.

Under a General Assembly resolution passed in November, the two sides were given three months to investigate Goldstone's findings and hold perpetrators accountable. In February, UN-Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said both sides had been inconclusive in their investigations, but did not recommend further action on the issue. Rights groups slammed Ban’s report as letting accused war criminals off the hook.

An Arab-backed resolution to be put to a vote on Friday calls On Israel and the Palestinians "to conduct investigations that are independent, credible and in conformity with international standards."

It also asks Ban to report back to the assembly "within a period of five months on the implementation of the present resolution, with a view to the consideration of further action, if necessary, by the relevant UN organs and bodies, including the Security Council."

Falk was incredulous about the five-month extension. "There’s no responsible reason for this delay," he said. "It’s been well over a year since the events occurred there’s been ample scrutiny” of Goldstone’s findings, he added. “It doesn’t seem like an appropriate response."

In Falk’s view, the General Assembly resolution in November left open avenues for international action but this “depended on the balance of political authority.”

Since the United States is expected to veto any resolution in the UN Security Council on the Gaza report, human rights advocates are seeking ways to implement the Goldstone's recommendations through other avenues.......

Human rights advocates believe Ban and other UN organs have come under political pressure from the report’s opponents (Israel and the US) to bury the report,....  Full story