U.N. Rights Council Endorses Gaza Report

U.N. Rights Council Endorses Gaza Report
By SHARON OTTERMAN
Copyright by The New York Times
Published: October 16, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/17/world/middleeast/17nations.html?hpw


The United Nations Human Rights Council voted Thursday to endorse a report detailing evidence of war crimes committed by Israeli and Palestinian militants during the Gaza war, moving the inquiry a step closer to the Security Council and possible criminal investigations.

The resolution endorsing the report, which took place after two days of debate, passed by a vote of 25 to 6, with 11 nations abstaining. The resolution, virtually identical to a Palestinian proposal introduced earlier in the week, gained a slimmer margin in the 47-member council than its backers had hoped. Both the United States and Israel have warned that any progress on the report would undermine the prospects for peace talks with the Palestinians.

Most of the developing nations on council voted for the resolution, including the Islamic majority nations of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, as well as China, India, Russia and Brazil, whose proposal for a toned-down version of the resolution did not have a significant impact on the adopted text.

Six nations, including the Netherlands, Italy and the United States, voted against the resolution, while five others, including France and Britain, were officially recorded as absent and not included in the vote totals at all, according to the secretariat of the council.

"The clock on the report starts now," said Ibrahim Khraishi, the Palestinian Authority’s United Nations ambassador in Geneva, adding that he hoped the Security Council in New York would take up the report, The Associated Press reported.

The Goldstone report on last winter’s Gaza war — so named for its lead investigator, South African jurist Richard Goldstone — found evidence that both Israeli and Palestinian actions amounted to war crimes, but it was more harshly critical of Israel.

It recommends that the Human Rights Council endorse the report and call on the secretary general of the United Nations, Ban Ki-Moon, to ask the United Nations Security Council to take up the report’s findings as a threat to the maintenance of international peace and security.

Further, it recommends that Israel and Palestinian authorities be given six months to show that they are conducting credible investigations into the allegations of war crimes. The Security Council is asked to monitor progress during those six months, and refer the charges to the International Criminal Court in the Hague if these domestic investigations are judged as inadequate.

The court’s lead prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, had no comment Friday on a possible war crimes probe into the Gaza conflict. The Palestinians have separately asked the court to take up the matter.

The Palestinian push for a vote endorsing the report reversed an earlier decision, made under American pressure, to delay action on the report as the Obama administration pushes for a peace process to get underway. American diplomats have called the report flawed and said they do not believe it is a matter for the Security Council.

Douglas M. Griffiths, the American delegate at the Human Rights Council in Geneva, told the body that Washington was disappointed with the outcome of the vote. "We’re focused on moving forward in the peace process and we feel that this is a distraction from that," Griffiths told The A.P.

The Israeli Ambassador to the Security Council, Gabriela Shalev, has said that she has been assured that the United States will veto any action on the within the Security Council, her spokeswoman, Mirit Cohen, said Thursday. Even so, there has been a concerted effort by Israeli officials to lobby international opinion against the report.

On breaches of the Geneva Conventions as grave as those alleged in the report —including its finding that Israeli soldiers deliberately targeted civilians — any nation that has agreed to the conventions has jurisdiction to investigate the crimes in their national courts. The Goldstone report recommends that those nations do so, setting up a possible situation of cases being brought against Israeli officials elsewhere.

There have been many reports by non-governmental and other organizations on potential war crimes committed during the Gaza conflict, but the Goldstone report, conducted by a respected team of jurists, has been given special weight by many human rights organizations. More than 180 interviews were conducted and 10,000 documents reviewed in creating the 575-page report. Its research, however, was limited by Israeli refusal to cooperate with investigators, and Israel has dismissed the final report as one-sided and biased, failing to recognize its right to self-defense.