July 8, 2012

JERUSALEM (JTA) – Israel will not cooperate with a United Nations fact-finding mission on the West Bank settlements, the foreign ministry announced.

The United Nations’ Human Rights Council on June 6 appointed three independent experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how Israel’s West Bank settlements affect Palestinians.

“The establishment of this mission is another blatant expression of the singling out of Israel in the UNHRC and of the uncandid approach that characterizes the Council’s dealing with Israel,” the foreign ministry said in a statement.

“This fact-finding mission will find no cooperation in Israel, and its members will not be allowed to enter Israel and the Territories. Its existence embodies the inherent distortion that typifies the UNHRC treatment of Israel and the hijacking of the important human rights agenda by non-democratic countries. The latter, unbothered by and dismissive of human rights, are taking advantage of their political and numerical weight in order to distort systematically the proceedings and rules of the UNHRC and to empty its workings of all moral content,” the statement continues.

Israel suspended its ties with the Human Rights Council in March after it voted to establish the settlements fact-finding mission.

The president of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Uruguay Ambassador Laura Dupuy Lasserre, on June 6 named three women to the fact-finding panel, The Associated Press reported. 

Dupuy Lasserre said their mission will be to look how the Israeli settlements affect “the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of the Palestinian people,” the AP reported.

The delegates are Christine Chanet of France, Unity Dow of Botswana and Asma Jahangir of Pakistan.
 

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