B’nai B’rith International decries the reported selection of Goldstone Report coauthor Christine Chinkin to replace Richard Falk as the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. During Falk’s tenure as special rapporteur, he repeatedly directed acute animosity and conspiracy theories at Israel, and new vitriol could be expected from Chinkin—an Arab League-backed appointee.
Chinkin has long demonstrated a virulent bias against Israel, coauthoring the inflammatory Goldstone Report in 2009. The report was meant to offer an assessment of events during Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s defensive operation in the Gaza Strip that ended in January 2009. Undertaken with a biased mandate, the report’s conclusions were quickly discredited. Richard Goldstone, for whom the report is titled, renounced key elements of the report two years after releasing it.
In recent weeks, former Indonesian U.N. Ambassador Makarim Wibisono, who also had a record of one-sided, anti-Israel statements, had been floated as a possible Falk successor. This was in apparent disregard for the nominee advanced by a consultative group to the council president, who was pressured to opt for a more overtly partisan choice.
“The very position held until now by Falk—authorized only to scrutinize Israeli practices—epitomizes the Human Rights Council’s obvious bias against Israel,” B’nai B’rith International President Allan J. Jacobs said. “Even when given the opportunity to appoint a new, relatively untainted individual to this inherently discriminatory position, the council clearly has no interest in so much as the appearance of a more responsible approach. At the expense of true peacemaking and of U.N. credibility, candidates like Chinkin are poised to represent more of the same gross politicization of human rights.”
Beyond the nomination of Falk’s successor at the Human Rights Council, it appears that his own wife Hilal Elver, of Turkey, is being appointed as the Council’s special rapporteur on the right to food. Elver shares her husband’s malignant anti-Israel and anti-American convictions.
“It’s not surprising the Human Rights Council is looking to appoint a new pair of anti-Israel rapporteurs and the world needs to take notice,” B’nai B’rith International Executive Vice President Daniel S. Mariaschin said. “It’s clear the council would rather take ‘guidance’ from some of the international community’s worst human rights offenders than actually focus on combating their egregious abuses.”
Active at the United Nations since its inception, B’nai B’rith International will continue to monitor U.N. activities in New York, Geneva and elsewhere to call attention to anti-Israel bias and discrimination.
