United Nations Commission on Human Rights

It was never clear why the commission was needed.

In 1993, the UN Commission on Human Rights had already established a Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories to report on Israeli human rights violations, but not those of Palestinian terror groups, and that office has produced a steady stream of reports for the HRC about alleged Israeli villainy.

The HRC also appointed a fact-finding mission after the brief war between Israel and Hamas in 2008 to 2009, and it established a Commission of Inquiry after the war in 2014.

Despite the word independent in its title, the new commission remains fully dependent on the same presuppositions and skewed methodology of other HRC-charged bodies that study Israel.

It was attributed to her by the extreme rightist Rabbi Meir Kahane, who despised Meir and likely grafted his own phobias onto her to legitimize them.

Regardless, the PLO repeated this claim endlessly.

Today, Al-Azhar University in Cairo renders Meir's statement as, quote, "Every morning I wish to wake up and not find a single Palestinian child alive." In nineteen eighty-nine, Nabil Ramlawi, the PLO's representative with the UN Commission on Human Rights, claimed that the Israelis had forced over four thousand abortions on Palestinian women, sometimes using poison gases.

He also revived an earlier accusation that the Israelis poisoned Palestinian schoolgirls in the West Bank to rend them barren.

Of course, none of that is relevant to the meltdown.

The meltdown is for one reason and one reason alone, which is that for several years, um, Navi Pillay chaired, uh, the independent, uh, commission on Israeli practices in the occupied Palestinian territory established by, uh, the United Nations Human Rights Commission, and in, in one of its reports, um, explicitly concluded that Israel is perpetrating genocide against the Palestinians in, in the Gaza Strip.

And, and- Exactly as expected, there was a, you know, coordinated campaign, um, by, you know, all these pro-Israel flunkies and newspapers and op-eds and all the rest of it, basically saying that the Nobel Committee, um, was motivated by nothing other than blood libel and Jew hate and antisemitism and blah blah this and blah blah that.

Um, uh, you know, you began to see an immediate defamation campaign against her and the Nobel Committee.

Question one.

In the aftermath of World War II, Eleanor Roosevelt presided over intense debates as chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

What landmark document did she shepherd to adoption? Question two.

a text she famously dubbed the Magna Carta for all mankind.

Pillay, eighty-five, is a judge on the International Court of Justice.

She led the UN Human Rights Commission for six years, from two thousand eight to two thousand fourteen, and previously served as the president of the International Tribunal on the Rwandan Genocide for four years.

In remarks to colleagues after receiving the award, she noted that her most recent work was a report naming Israel's war in Gaza as a genocide.

Juergen Watne Friednes, the chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said Pillay's work is a source of hope and inspiration to all those who seek to bring about a more peaceful world.

But if they are not adhered to and there are no repercussions for the breaches of international law, then international law will become less and less and less effective.

I've been many times at the UN Human Rights Commission hearing the plain-plaintive calls from people in a very bad situation wanting the rest of the world to listen to the way that they're being treated.

And so you then move into the economic relationship and what we do about it.

So if we are trading normally, selling arms normally, rep-- defending Israel in international law, then there are no implications for Israel for its multiple breaches of international law.

Quisiera comenzar esta charla haciendo referencia a los principios rectores de los desplazamientos internos.

Estos fueron adoptados por la Comisión de Derechos Humanos de la ONU en 1998 y describen a los desplazados internos como personas o grupos de personas que se han visto forzadas u obligadas a huir o abandonar su hogar o lugar de residencia habitual, en particular como resultado o para evitar los efectos de un conflicto armado, situaciones de violencia generalizada, violaciones de los derechos humanos o desastres naturales o provocados por el hombre y que no han cruzado una frontera estatal internacionalmente reconocida.

Hay dos elementos clave en la noción del ser desplazado interno.

El primero es el carácter involuntario o coercitivo del movimiento, y el segundo es el hecho de que dicho movimiento se produce dentro de las fronteras nacionales.