PA Treachery over Flotilla probe
The UN Human Rights Council, based in Geneva, knows its onions on human rights. It was the HRC that commissioned the Goldstone Report. It is frequently at odds with New York. So when Turkey went to the UN two days after the Flotilla killings, it made sure to demand that the HRC investigate.
The Electronic Intifada has now revealed that the Palestine Authority tried to have the wording changed to remove the reference to the HRC and instead to set up an unspecified investigation which was to be “impartial” but not even “independent”.
At the time Israel’s Ehud Barak was offering Israel’s “own independent inquiry”, which though something of a contradiction in terms could, if the PA had succeeded, have ended up being the only report to the UN.
Fortunately the PA’s wrecking amendment was rumbled, Turkey’s original wording was accepted, and the HRC investigation is to start work under the leadership of a former president of the International Criminal Court, Philippe Kirsch.
And fortunately too, the PA’s treachery has been laid bare. The most damning of the documents revealed (courtesy of Microsoft Word’s “Track Changes” feature) the exact changes they tried to insert, and the attached email sent from the PA’s UN New York mission names three PA diplomats who were all part of the plot. Now they protest that their wording was just as good.
Asa Winstanley, writing for EI, concludes: In October 2009, the Goldstone report was finally adopted by the HRC. Despite the PA initially withdrawing support for the South African jurist’s investigation into Israel’s 2008-09 onslaught against the Gaza Strip, Mahmoud Abbas, who extended his expired term as PA president under contested “emergency laws,” was forced into a humiliating U-turn after an outpouring of disgust and protest from Palestinians around the world.
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