U.N. Human Rights Council To Reopen Debate on Goldstone Report
The U.N. Human Rights Council will reopen the debate on the Goldstone report in a special session.
The debate in Geneva is set for Thursday, the day after the U.N. Security Council in New York is scheduled to discuss the report.
Eighteen of 47 Human Rights Council member states approved a motion to hold the special session, the sixth time the council has singled out Israel in a special session in its three-year existence, the Associated Press reported.
The debate is expected to last into Friday and include discussion of the recent violence in Jerusalem.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his support for reopening the debate on the report in a weekend telephone call to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the French news agency AFP reported Tuesday, quoting Ban’s spokeswoman.
The United Nations report accuses Israel and Hamas of committing war crimes and possible crimes against humanity during last winter’s Gaza military offensive, called Operation Cast Lead by Israel.
A vote on the report in the Human Rights Council was postponed until March at the request of the Palestinian representative. Abbas has said he authorized the postponement in order to gain support for a vote to send the report on to the Security Council for action, which could include charges filed with the International Court of Justice.
On Tuesday, during a tour of the West Bank city of Jenin, Abbas called on the Arab nations sitting on the Human Rights Council to support a reopening of the debate on the report.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
