Ted Belman
Recently I reported on a speech by Michael Ignatieff under the title Ignatieff in the lion’s den and also posted Ignatieff’s non-apology by my friend Rochelle Wilner. Ignatieff had come to the Jewish community to apologize for accusing Israel of war crimes. Unfortunate he kept stressing the need for Israel to abide by international human rights law and the Geneva Convention. Irwin Cotler was in the room.
I wrote to Irwin subsequently to plead with him to make Israel’s case vis a vis international law. Whether he was responding to me or not, a week or so later, he delivered a speech to THE SPEAKERS ACTION GROUP and the CANADIAN JEWISH CIVIL RIGHTS ASSOCIATION entitled THE LAW AND HUMAN RIGHTS…21ST CENTURY CHALLENGES and he did just that. I was also present to hear that speech. It was a great speech delivered extemporaneously and fortunately recorded. I got a copy of the recording and struggled to type it. In many ways it is grammatically incorrect as license was taken to have more impact. This is not the full speech but the parts that I wanted to focus on.
Irwin Cotler spoke on justice and inclusiveness in the international area.
On the eve of the sixtieth anniversary of the State of Israel of the reconstitution of an aboriginal people in its ancestral homeland. And I have used the term aboriginal people with respect to the Jewish people because very often one hears reference to the notion that Israel and the Jewish people as being a colonial implant in the Middle East post holocaust. It is important to appreciate the aboriginalness of the Jewish people with respect to its legitimacy in this present day, The only people in the world today who inhabit the same land, embrace the same Abrahamic religion, study the same aboriginal bible, speak the same aboriginal language, Hebrew, and bears the same aboriginal name, Israel, as it did thirty-five hundred years ago. In other words if any of the aboriginal prophets entered the room today, they could conduct a conversation with us across space and time in the common language. This is something that bears recall and remembrance as we move toward the commemoration and celebration of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary.
That paragraph also included, “There are two aboriginal people laying claim to the same aboriginal home”. I was very disappointed that he would refer to the Palestinians as a people and an aboriginal one at that. I intend to follow that up. In addition, in his speech he kept referring to Srebrenica as a massacre along with the holocaust and Rawanda. I intend to follow that up also.
After referring to the holocaust and our collective commitment to “never again”, he identified four lessons that must inform our action.
1 The danger of state sanctioned incitement to genocide and the corresponding responsibility to prevent and protect.
2. The dangers of indifference and inaction.
3. The danger of a culture of impunity
4. The phenomena of discrimination and exclusion in the international arenas
I have extracted only his remarks on the fourth under the title, Justice and Inclusiveness in the International area.
I regret to say what we witnessing in the international arena, particularly in the United Nations is the ongoing deligitimization and demonization of Israel which is carried out, no longer under the rule of law. It precedes tragically under the protective cover of the UN. It invokes the imprimatur of international law. It marches under the banner of human rights because it knows in a world in which human rights is the new secular religion of our times, as I have otherwise spoken of it, then to hold Israel out to be the main new human rights violator of our times, is to posit Israel as the new anti-Christ of our times.
Let me make one thing clear. I don’t wish to suggest that some how Israel is to be above the law or that Israel is not responsible for any violations of international human rights or humanitarian law. On the contrary, Israel like any other state must be held accountable for any violation of humanitarian or human rights law. The Jewish people are not entitled for any privilege or preference before the law because of the holocaust.
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That’s my point, like any other state. The problem is not that anyone would seek that Israel should be above the law. But that Israel is being systematically denied equality before the law in the international arena. Not that human rights standards should not be applied to Israel, they must be, but that these standards must be applied equally to everyone else. That’s what an equal and inclusive justice system is all about. Not that Israel need not respect human rights; Israel must like any other state respect human rights
But that the rights of Israel and the international community deserve equal respect. And I say this because if I take one or two case studies in the time that permits, you’ll see why I make as a thesis that the singling out of one member state in the international community for differential and discriminatory treatment is not only that which is prejudicial to the member state, which happens to be Israel in this case, but that it tends is to undermine the very nature of a just and inclusive international legal system.
I will give you one case study, the United Nations Human Rights Council and I am choosing that because it may not be that well known, that the Human Rights Council was established as the repository for international human rights law. This was intended as the standard setter and standard bearer for the development for international human rights law and the international human rights legal system.
After the Human Rights Commission, its predecessor, as Kofi Annan acknowledged, had become discredited, it was hoped that the Human Rights Council would reflect and represent its universalist, inclusive, egalitarian mandate that it was destined (designed) to have.
Yet in its first year of operation the HRC adopted 10 resolutions of condemnation. All 10 resolutions of condemnation singled out one member state of the international community, which happened to be Israel. At the same time the major human rights violators, Iran, Sudan and China were not the object even of one resolution of condemnation. Let alone that there was state sanctioned incitement to genocide in Iran, or the genocide by attrition in Darfur or China’s enabling of the genocide in Darfur. Not one resolution of condemnation.
So it’s not just a question of this being prejudicial to Israel, it tends to undermine the whole rule of law, the whole principle of equal and inclusive justice under the rule of law.
And that’s why I say, the demonization and delitimation of Israel is being laundered under the rule of law, under the protective cover of the UN, invoking the imprimatur of international law and marching under the banner of human rights. It doesn’t end with what I have just mentioned. Very recently, just three weeks ago, things could at all ever be worse.
In one week, at a meeting of the Human Rights Council, it did the following; it replaced John Duggard, who is the special rappatuer for Israel human rights violations in the occupied territories. I am not saying that the UN shouldn’t investigate human rights violations in the occupied territories. I am saying that the mandate is only to look into violations by Israel in the occupied territories. At the same time there is a special permanent UN Agenda item called Human Rights Violations by Israel in the occupied territories, and another one for the rest of the world.
In other words only one country is singled out for an Alice in Wonderland condemnation before the hearing takes place, under the auspices of the UN. The special rappatuer, John Duggard, who likened Israel to an apartheid state. You may not appreciate the seriousness of likening Israel to an apartheid state, is the cognoscenti of the UN and you should know that these meetings are attended by all kinds of people who are all exposed to this denunciation. In the lexicon of the International Criminal Court Treaty, an apartheid state is a criminal state that warrants being dismantled. All those who support that state are also seen to be complicit in the commission of a crime against humanity.
He was replaced, because his mandate came up as a special rappatuer, by an American Jewish professor of international law, John Zigler, whose distinction was that he likened Israel not just to an apartheid state but to the Nazis. And what do you do with a Nazi state, well you dismantle it, because it does not have the right to exist. And therefore when I speak of deligitimization and demonization, these are the kinds of conduct that I am referring to that is taking place under the authority of the United Nations.
I will tell you of my own experience in that regard. Sixteen months ago, I received a call from the UN Commission on Human Rights, Louise Arbour, a former colleague of mine at Osgood Hall Law School and a former member of the Canadian Supreme Court, She said, Irwin I am calling on behalf of the President of the UN Council on Human Rights. We would like you to be a member of a two-person, fact-finding commission of enquiry that is going to Beit Hanoun in Gaza where tragically 18 Palestinians have been killed by a shell from an Israeli response to the rocketing of Sderot . So I said to her, is this fact finding commission of enquiry going also to Sderot which of course is subject to rocket attacks everyday. If there were no rocket attacks there would be no need for a reprisal. She said no, it’s going only to Beit Hanoun but Bishop Tutu is one of the members, you can be the second and you can bring it some balance. And I said, you know Louise, I am sure you have seen the resolution establishing this fact finding commission of enquiry. Its not only that its one sided in that its going only to Beit Hanoun, but the resolution passed by the Human Rights Council establishing this fact-finding commission of enquiry, states that Israel deliberately killed women and children in Beit Hanoun. What is there to investigate when you and the Human Rights Council in the resolution already determined that Israel committed war crimes and crimes against humanity?
I said, I’m sorry; I will not be a fig leaf for that exercise. When Bishop Tutu came to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2006 to report, I then shared with the Human Rights Council exactly what I have now shared with you and I said to them the tragedy is not only that Israel is the object of this prejudicial singling out of a member state of the UN for discriminatory treatment, but the problem is that all this is undermining the very integrity of the UN in general and the Human Rights Council in particular which we should take so seriously. That all of this diminishes the imprimatur of international law under whose authority these actions are being taken, that all these things are diminishing the struggle for Human Rights and the struggle against racism in whose name these things are being passed and adopted.
It is time that the United Nations returns to it founding ideals and its founding principles. And I say now, we meet on the sixtieth anniversary of both the Genocide Convention and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that I trust that the international community and I would like to see our Canadian government to exercise the moral and political and diplomatic and intellectual leadership to stand up with respect to the state sanctioned incitement to genocide in Ahmadinejad’s Iran, to stand up and mobilize the international community with regard to the genocide by attrition in Darfur, to strike out against this culture of impunity and bring in a framework of accountability and return the United Nations to its founding ideals so that when we speak of the United Nations as an organizing principles of Canadian Foreign policy then we can say so with pride and not with embarrassment. That is where I hope we can start to look to as we come to the sixtieth anniversary of these great international treaties.
We all know the problem, except Ignatieff, that Cotler describes so well and we know what we should aspire to but we also know there is no chance in hell of fulfilling our aspirations.
So where does that leave human rights law? No where. If a law can’t be applied equally and with fairness and due process, it is no law.
I say to Michael Ignatieff and all those practitioners of human rights law, get your house in order and then speak to us. Until then shut the f… up.
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