UN’s investigators on Israel’s ‘Operation Protective Edge’ request delay after team-leader resigned

UNHRC’s war probe into Israel’s actions in Gaza to be led by US Judge Mary McGowan Davis, after William Schabas’ resignation in early February.

By i24news

 

UN investigators tasked with probing the 50-day war in Gaza last year asked Monday to postpone their report to allow time to adjust after the head of the team quit under Israeli pressure.

Smoke and dust rise following an Israeli air strike in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip, on July 8, 2014 – Photo: Said Khatib (AFP)

The Commission of Inquiry on the 2014 Gaza conflict had been scheduled to present its findings to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on March 23.

But in a letter addressed to the head of the council, the investigators requested to delay their presentation until the next council session in June, saying they needed “to adjust our work due to the late resignation of (our) former chair”.

Canadian international law expert William Schabas resigned as chair of the commission last month after Israel complained he could not be impartial because he had prepared a legal opinion for the Palestine Liberation Organisation in October 2012, the United Nations said.

Schabas strongly denied that he was beholden to the PLO but said he was reluctantly stepping down to avoid the inquiry into the July-August conflict — commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council — being compromised in any away.

YouTube

Former head of UNHRC Commission to Gaza Willaim Schabas – YouTube screenshot

Israel was not satisfied, calling for the entire inquiry to be shelved, insisting the commission and the Human Rights Council which created it are inherently biased against the Jewish state.

“Following the resignation of the panel’s chairman, who was biased against Israel, the UN Human Rights Council – an anti-Israel entity that has proven its decisions have nothing to do with human rights – should shelve the report it instigated,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu following Schabas’ resignation.

In 2014, the council adopted more resolutions against Israel than against Iran, Syria and North Korea, combined, the PM added. “Hamas, other terror organizations and terror-supporting regimes around us are the ones that should be investigated,” Netanyahu further added.

Schabas’s resignation left the commission with only two members: former New York judge Mary McGowan Davis, who took over as chair, and Doudou Diene of Senegal, who previously served as the UN’s watchdog on racism and on post-conflict Ivory Coast.

McGowan-Davis is expected to be much more balanced with regards to Israel.

An acting justice on the supreme court of the state of New York from 1986 to 1998, McGowan Davis is a renowned expert on transitional justice and human rights law.

She led the UNHRC’s committee that implemented the findings of the Goldstone report in 2009. At the time, Israel provided her with documentation and substantial information surrounding Israel’s inquiries into Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, Haaretzreported.

McGowan-Davis released a report following the affair, in which she criticized Israel for carrying out lengthy inquiries, but at the same time noted that “Israel devoted substantial resources to investigating more than 400 complaints of improper behavior in Gaza.” She also commended Israel for carrying out thorough investigations in an appropriate manner.

In her letter, McGowan Davis explained that in addition to dealing with the shrinking of the team, the commission was facing a “large number of additional submissions and documents received over the past few weeks from both sides,” which it needed to “analyse with the utmost objectivity.”

Joachim Ruecker, the president of the Human Rights Council, said in a statement that he supported the request for extra time “to allow them to finalise a comprehensive report as mandated.”

An Israeli soldier walks past a Merkava tank along the border between Israel and the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, on July 30, 2014, after returning from combat in the Palestinian enclave – Photo: Gil Cohen Magen (AFP)

But the council as a whole will need to officially accept the delay, something that could likely happen on Tuesday.

The Gaza conflict ended with a truce between Israel and the territory’s Islamist de facto rulers Hamas on August 26 after the deaths of more than 2,140 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and 73 people on the Israeli side, mostly soldiers.

The rights council vowed in August that both Israel and Hamas would be “subjected to a thorough investigation.”

But Israel, which has long had a stormy relationship with the council, has fiercely opposed the probe from the start.

Last November, it announced that it would not cooperate with Schabas’s investigation because of the “obsessive hostility against Israel of this commission.”

 

(with AFP)

View original i24news publication at: http://www.i24news.tv/en/news/international/middle-east/63767-150309-gaza-war-probe-requests-delay-after-chief-s-resignation