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 Palestinian territories, made the remarks ahead of a Friday vote at the UN General Assembly, which is expected to give Israeli and Palestinian authorities five more months to investigate war crimes charges outlined in the Goldstone report.

“I think it's 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.”

The UN-mandated fact-finding mission led by South African jurist Richard Goldstone investigated the possibility of the commission of war crimes during Israel’s three-week assault on Gaza in 2008 and 2009. During the hostilities, more than 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis died. 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.

.... 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...

....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 and 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 Goldstone's recommendations through other avenues...   Full story