In a decision taken as the organisation's general conference was meeting in Paris last week, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), has decided to suspend the voting rights of the United States and Israel two years after the countries stopped paying their dues in protest against UNESCO's decision to grant full membership to the Palestinians. Following the decision to admit Palestine as a full member state of UNESCO in October 2011, taken by a vote of the organisation's general conference in which 107 states voted to make Palestine a member and only 14 voted against, the US and Israel withheld their dues to the UN organisation. The US decision immediately deprived UNESCO of 22 per cent of its budget, leaving an estimated $143 million shortfall for 2012-13. As a result of the US decision to withhold its funding of the UN organisation, presented at the time as being due to a US law that prohibits funding to any organisation recognising the Palestinians' demands for their own state, UNESCO has been plunged into a funding crisis, forcing it to cut back programmes and potentially lay off staff. Following the withdrawal of the US funding, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova launched a worldwide campaign for make-up funding to help the UN organisation to secure its future and in a bid to safeguard UNESCO programmes designed to help save the world's cultural and natural heritage, to promote global education and to support press freedom, among other tasks. The loss of voting rights by the US and Israel, which took place following a deadline last Friday to provide justification for non-payment and a plan to pay missed dues, does not mean that either country has been ejected from UNESCO. However, it does mean that both will no longer have the right to help shape the organisation's programmes, decided upon by its general conference and implemented under a 15-member executive board. In a statement made to the UNESCO general conference last week, Bokova said that “I regret the loss of voting rights by the United States,” adding that “I believe that UNESCO's work to advance literacy and quality education as a way to fight ignorance and intolerance is shared by the American people [and] our action to counter extremism, racism and discrimination by safeguarding common cultural heritage is shared by the American people.” The US State Department said in a statement that “we regret that the United States lost its vote in the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation general conference as a result of legislative restrictions that have precluded payment of US dues to UNESCO. The restrictions were triggered when UNESCO member states voted to grant the Palestinians membership as a state in 2011.” UNESCO “directly advances US interests in supporting girls' and women's education, facilitating important scientific research, promoting tolerance, protecting and preserving the world's natural and cultural heritage, supporting freedom of the press, and much more”, the statement said, adding that “it is in that vein that President [Barack] Obama has requested legislative authority to allow the United States to continue to pay its dues to UN agencies that admit the Palestinians as a member state when doing so is in the US national interest.” “Although that proposal has not yet been enacted by congress, the president remains committed to that goal,” the statement said. The spat over unpaid US dues to UNESCO as a result of the organisation's admitting the Palestinians comes against the background of widespread perceptions that the US has long been using its position in international organisations to block Palestinian interests and to promote those of Israel. The US has vetoed some 42 UN Security Council resolutions critical of Israel since the early 1970s, for example, most recently in February 2011 when the US vetoed a resolution criticising Israeli settlement-building in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. All other 14 members of the Security Council backed the resolution, including Britain and France. It also comes against a background of long-standing US quarrels with UNESCO, in which it has sought to use the threat of reduced funding or outright withdrawal as a way of shaping the organisation's programmes. In 1984, the US formally withdrew from UNESCO as a result of what it called the organisation's anti-Western policies and mismanagement, being joined by the United Kingdom and Singapore in 1985. These withdrawals also had a significant effect on UNESCO funding, forcing it to scale back its programmes and causing some embarrassment to an organisation that had been deserted by two of its most important founding members. The UK rejoined UNESCO in 1997, followed by the US in 2003 and Singapore in 2007. Israel's relations with UNESCO have also been marked by quarrels over the organisation's policies, most recently its admission of Palestine as a member state. In a statement to the Associated Press, the Israeli ambassador to UNESCO said that his country “objected to the politicisation of UNESCO, or any international organisation, with the accession of a non-existing country like Palestine”. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, commenting on the UNESCO decision on Monday, the fear in Israel is that there may be “more serious consequences if Palestine joins other agencies such as the World Health Organisation”. Earlier, relations between UNESCO and Israel had been marked by tensions over the organisation's flagship World Heritage programme, which seeks to identify and protect sites of outstanding cultural and historical importance worldwide. Israel has sought to use this programme to support its claims to Jerusalem, currently listed as a World Heritage Site “proposed by Jordan” by UNESCO. According to the organisation's website, discussion of the Israeli claim to list Jerusalem as an Israeli site has been postponed “until an agreement on the status of the City of Jerusalem in conformity with international law is reached”.
