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November 20, 2009
Watchdog focuses on UN
Neuer will discuss Goldstone Report at Hillel gala.
PAT JOHNSON
“Orwellian” is the word that Hillel Neuer uses to describe the United Nations Human Rights Council.
“When they say peace they mean war, when they say human rights, they mean dictatorship or terrorism. The powers that dominate the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva are countries like Castro’s Cuba, Ghaddafi’s Libya.”
Neuer is executive director of UN Watch, a nongovernmental organization based in Geneva whose mandate is to monitor the performance of the UN by the yardstick of its own charter. Neuer is the keynote speaker at the Vancouver Hillel Foundation’s ninth annual gala later this month.
Neuer, who originates from Montreal, testifies regularly before the UN Human Rights Council. His 2007 verbal assault on the council went viral, becoming the most viewed NGO speech in the history of the UN.
The inverted reality of the UN Human Rights Council is exemplified, Neuer said, by the fact that approximately 80 percent of all the council’s resolutions targeting specific countries condemn Israel, while ignoring countries like Iran and the countless other human rights atrocities taking place globally.
“We know what Iran does to its own people. We know that Iran promotes terrorism abroad. We know that Iran sponsored and was behind the bombing of the Jewish community centre in Buenos Aires. We know that Iran funds and trains Hezbollah, which is a vicious terrorist organization with global reach. We know that Iran funds and trains Hamas, which is a terrorist organization that is opposed by the so-called moderate regimes in the region.”
Despite this, Neuer is careful to stress that the UN is an irreplaceable body.
“The UN is certainly indispensible,” said Neuer. “In a globalized world, you need an international organization on intellectual property, on health, on labor and on so many things. However, on some of the bodies that are most important to citizens around the world on a regular basis – issues like human rights – the UN is failing and it’s failing terribly.”
The UN’s human rights role was envisioned by great idealists like the American humanitarian Eleanor Roosevelt, the French jurist René Cassin and the Canadian who wrote the first draft of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, John Humphrey, said Neuer. Now, the powers that dominate the UN Human Rights Council are countries like Cuba, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Russia and China. “Countries that violate human rights systematically, these are the countries that dominate the votes.”
In his upcoming Vancouver presentation, Neuer said he will share the untold day-by-day narrative of “Durban II.” The follow-up conference to the notorious 2001 “conference against racism” in South Africa, Durban II was held in Geneva, in April. The 2001 conference featured incidents of medieval-style anti-Semitism, including cartoons of fanged, horned demonic Jews, hook-nosed Jews depicted as Nazis, distribution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and accusations that Israel perpetrates ethnic cleansing and genocide. It was in Durban that the apartheid libel, equating Israel with the former racist regime in South Africa, was first widely promulgated.
The unvarnished anti-Semitism of 2001 Durban was not repeated in 2009 Geneva, Neuer said, because UN Watch helped ensure that, this time, their allies were prepared. Although the final resolution adopted by the follow-up conference was not what Neuer calls “kosher,” it was a triumph of sorts in a world where democratic countries celebrate what victories they can.
“Durban II was not the fiasco of Durban I,” he said. “Contrary to the efforts and designs and the wishes of [Iran’s Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad, of Ghaddafi, of anti-Western, anti-Israel forces around the world, Durban II was a massive defeat. It was a massive defeat for all of them.”
Outside the main meeting, the nongovernmental groups that fomented the worst of the anti-Semitism at Durban were absent from Geneva, in part because UN Watch and its allies, according to Neuer, arranged to deny them hotels, meeting facilities and funding.
“So the haters of Israel remarked that walking around Geneva that week was like walking around ‘Israel-occupied territory,’ ” he said. “That’s how they felt.”
In addition to Durban II, one of the Human Rights Council’s accomplishments this year was the Goldstone Report. Neuer ferociously denounces both the report and the author of the fact-finding mission’s report on last winter’s war in Gaza. Judge Richard Goldstone’s report was, according to Neuer, “born in sin.”
“How could he have accepted a mandate from the Human Rights Council? How could someone agree to work for a body that is the supreme court of injustice?” Neuer asked.
“[The council] condemned Israel as being guilty from the start,” Neuer said. “And only after Israel was condemned guilty did they set up a so-called inquiry, a so-called fact-finding mission, whose mandate was to document Israel’s guilt only. It didn’t go there with an open mind and it went there examining only one party. It was a complete kangaroo court.”
Any remaining credibility, Neuer charges, disappeared when Goldstone defended the appointment of Christine Chinkin to be one of his three co-panelists. Chinkin, a London School of Economics professor, publicly declared Israel guilty of war crimes before the fact-finding mission began.
“And he defended her as being an impartial judge, which is indefensible,” said Neuer.
When Israel refused to participate in a process in which the verdict was apparently predestined, Neuer speculated, Goldstone’s “heart was hardened.” At that point, Neuer said, Goldstone himself should have stepped down “because how do you pursue an inquiry with these issues when you don’t have Israel’s information?”
“Israel was put in a Catch-22,” said Neuer. If Israel did not cooperate, Neuer said, Goldstone would create a one-sided report reflecting only the Hamas narrative.
“And that’s what we have today,” said Neuer.
Recently, Goldstone stated that he was disappointed at how his report has been used to attack Israel, a statement that Neuer finds reprehensible.
“That was the most disingenuous remark I’ve ever heard about the Human Rights Council.
What did he possibly expect? What did we warn him? How could he have expected otherwise?”
Among the rare bright lights in a dark situation, Neuer credits Canada, which was a member of the Human Rights Council until June, with acting on the principles laid out by the visionary founders of the UN.
“Canada was superb. Canada was a leader. Canada was a moral leader, it was a beacon for the world, it stood up for principle,” he said. “On occasion it was 46-1, Canada being the only one and I, personally, will never forget how proud I was as a Canadian to see Canada standing up on principle.”
On Durban II, Canada also led the pack, he said.
“The Canadian government was the first to announce that they would not participate in what they called an anti-Western, anti-Semitic circus,” said Neuer. Ten other countries followed suit and only after 20 others in the European Union were about to withdraw their participation was the text changed. Tickets for Neuer’s keynote address at Vancouver Hillel’s gala, on Sunday, Nov. 29, are available at 604-224-4748.
Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of programs for Hillel in British Columbia.
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