Mentions United Nations (UN)

Francesca Albanese says Israel has violated three of the five acts listed under the UN Genocide Convention Including: Killing members of a specific group, causing serious bodily or mental harm, and deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole and in part. She also found that genocidal acts were approved and given effect after statements of genocidal intent by senior Israeli military and government officials. These acts, Albanese argues, are part of a 'settler-colonial process of erasure' - which has been underway for more than 70 years. She recommends - among other things - an immediate arms embargo on Israel. And for member states to support South Africa in its attempt to prosecute Israel at the International Court of Justice.

The growth of Israeli settlements amounts to the transfer by Israel of its own civilian population into occupied territories, which is a war crime, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk said on Friday.

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“Settler violence and settlement-related violations have reached shocking new levels, and risk eliminating any practical possibility of establishing a viable Palestinian state,” Turk said in a statement that accompanied a 16-page report about the growth in illegal Israeli housing units.

The report, based on the UN’s own monitoring as well as other sources, documented 24,300 new Israeli housing units in the occupied West Bank during a one-year period through to the end of October, which it said was the highest since monitoring began in 2017.

It also said there had been a dramatic increase in the intensity, severity and regularity of both Israeli settler and state violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, particularly since Hamas’s October 7 attacks on southern Israel, which triggered the current war in the Gaza Strip.

Since then, more than 400 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli security forces or by settlers, the report said.

Freedom of opinion and expression, academic freedom, even freedom of conviction and belief are in grave danger when governments adopt chauvinistic legislation that demonizes other nations and cultures and pretends to divide the world into “democracies” and “autocracies”, into the “good guys” and the “bad guys”.  This kind of epistemological Manichaeism encompasses what we call “exceptionalism”, with its brazen double standards.  The US sets the rules, the so-called “rules-based international order”, which it applies arbitrarily, notwithstanding the existing order established in the United Nations Charter.

This epistemological chaos is aggravated when criminal legislation is adopted that criminalizes dissent, even in social media, even in private exchanges. Over the past thirty years we have witnessed a steady exacerbation of Russophobic and Sinophobic tendencies that have been instrumentalized by governments to fan the flames of hatred and increase the cacophony of the drums of war.  The logic of fanaticism has its own dynamic, as hatred feeds on hatred.

Fear-mongering and hate-mongering has been used to justify provocations and ultimately the use of force, both militarily and in the form of unilateral coercive measures UCMs, wrongly referred to as “sanctions”.  Here again we find ourselves caught in the web of our own propaganda and ready-made prejudices.  We put labels on our perceived rivals, and call them undemocratic, dictators, tyrants, murderers.  We misuse the term “sanctions”, because we want to convey the impression that we possess the moral or legal authority to punish other States, individuals, and enterprises.  We behave as prosecutors, judges and juries.

According to international law, only the Security Council possesses the authority to impose sanctions.  Everything else entails the illegal “use of force”, specifically prohibited in article 2 (4) of the UN Charter.

On Monday, MPs will mark the UDHR’s anniversary by gathering for a candlelight vigil, under the title ‘Parliamentarians for Peace.’ How ironic that the majority have given the green light to some of the most appalling levels of death and destruction we have witnessed in decades.

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Across the board, our political representatives are showing monstrous hypocrisy in their commitment to a document they show no signs of respecting. As we speak, our government is attempting to circumvent international law in order to implement its assault on the rights of refugees. And they are emboldened by an opposition front bench that refuses to make the moral case for the right to asylum. The Tories have not ‘failed’ on immigration because they have ‘lost control of the borders’. They have failed because they have proven incapable of protecting the human rights of those seeking a place of safety. Refugees are not political pawns to be debated and disempowered. They are human beings, whose hopes and dreams should not be sacrificed to appease the right-wing press. 

"What is the message we are sending Palestinians if we cannot unite behind a call to halt the relentless bombardment of Gaza?" Deputy UAE U.N. Ambassador Mohamed Abushahab asked the council. "Indeed, what is the message we are sending civilians across the world who may find themselves in similar situations?"

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Deputy U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Robert Wood told the council that the draft resolution was a rushed, imbalanced text "that was divorced from reality, that would not move the needle forward on the ground in any concrete way."

"We do not support this resolution's call for an unsustainable ceasefire that will only plant the seeds for the next war," said Wood.

The U.S. had offered substantial amendments to the draft, including a condemnation of the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks that Israel says killed 1,200 people and in which 240 people were taken hostage.

Britain's U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward said her country abstained because there was no condemnation of Hamas.

"Israel needs to be able to address the threat posed by Hamas and it needs to do so in a manner that abides by international humanitarian law so that such an attack can never be carried out again," she told the council.

Long sentences handed to two Just Stop Oil protesters for scaling the M25 bridge over the Thames are a potential breach of international law and risk silencing public concerns about the environment, a UN expert has said.

In a strongly worded intervention, Ian Fry, the UN’s rapporteur for climate change and human rights, said he was “particularly concerned” about the sentences, which were “significantly more severe than previous sentences imposed for this type of offending in the past”.

He said: “I am gravely concerned about the potential flow-on effect that the severity of the sentences could have on civil society and the work of activists, expressing concerns about the triple planetary crisis and, in particular, the impacts of climate change on human rights and on future generations.”