The United States slammed the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) on Wednesday in Geneva, Switzerland, for its biased treatment of Israel and providing a platform for the most egregious violators of human rights like Iran.
“It is unacceptable that the HRC treats Israel differently from every other UN member,” U.S. Ambassador to South Sudan Mary Catherine Phee said in Geneva for the council’s 37th session, according to the Jerusalem Post. “The institutional integrity of the Council demands that the efforts to delegitimize and isolate Israel through such blatant bias must end.”
Phee reportedly blasted the UNHRC’s mandate that a permanent investigator be assigned to examine alleged Israeli human rights abuses in the West Bank and that they will be debated at every session under Agenda 7. The Israeli military goes beyond most countries to protect civilians and routinely operates in densely populated areas against terrorists who use civilians as human shields.
As the Jerusalem Post pointed out, “No other country has such a permanent mandate. All global human rights abuses are debated under Agenda Item 4, including those in Syria and Iran. None of the countries who are considered to be serial human rights abusers have a permanent investigator assigned to them.”
Israel is constantly held to a different standard than other countries.
McPhee reportedly also pointed out that “The charter itself says the UN organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its members. That is not the case when the special rapporteur’s mandate on the Occupied Palestinian Territories – unlike every other Council mandate – never requires renewal.”
There is, for example, no permanent investigator for countries like Sri Lanka, North Korea, Iran, Myanmar, South Sudan, or Syria, which have all seen some of the worst human rights abuses in recent history.
The day before McPhee’s comments, the United States reportedly said it was “appalled” that Iranian Justice Minster Seyyed Alireza Avaei was allowed to speak during a high level segment of the UNHRC.
“Minister Avaei oversaw the summary executions of Iranians in the late 1980s,” the U.S. said, according to the Jerusalem Post.
In December, Breitbart News reported:
A panel of distinguished policy experts discussed the deteriorating situation of human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran on Friday, emphasizing the need for the international community to hold Iran accountable for numerous, ongoing atrocities.
Among those human rights violations prominent in the discussion was the state-sponsored massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.
During that panel J. Kenneth Blackwell, former U.S. ambassador to the UNHRC, demanded action from Iran to address the 1988 massacre.
On Tuesday, the U.S. said, “As the recent head of the Tehran judiciary and current Minister of Justice, Avaei oversees systematic arbitrary arrests and detentions of Iranians engaging in peaceful political and civic activism, and imprisons them in a network of facilities notorious for suspicious deaths, the use of torture, and denial of medical care.”
Adelle Nazarian is a politics and national security reporter for Breitbart News. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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