As Israel's bloody raid on the Gaza-bound Turkish flotilla last May is raked over by the UN Human Rights Council, so the far more damning Goldstone Report on the war on Gaza is being brushed under the carpet, writes Amira Howeidy The Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and dozens of NGOs have debated the "human rights situation" in the occupied territories and Israel for two days. The meeting was also meant to hear out a committee of experts appointed by the council to follow up on UN action in light of the Goldstone report on Israel's 22-day war on Gaza in December 2008. Although the war claimed 1,400 Palestinian lives and maimed 5,000, with much graphic detail of the Israel assault captured on film, the UN has yet to decide -- two years after it ended -- how it will address what its own investigators have described as war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by Israel. The UNHRC, however, ended up being distracted by another Israeli violation of international law, probed by yet another committee of UN-appointed investigators: Israel's assault on the Gaza-bound aid ship Mavi Marmara. When it was attacked in international waters on 31 May the Marmara was part of a flotilla of ships attempting to break Israel's siege of Gaza. Manned by international activists and peace advocates from 70 countries, the Turkish registered Mavi Marmara was the flotilla's biggest ship. During the attack Israeli special forces killed nine unarmed civilians at point blank range, including an 18-year-old Turkish-US citizen. The UNHRC fact finding mission charged with investigating the attack published its report on 22 September. It found that Israel seriously violated both humanitarian and human rights law "during and after" the raid. No arms or weapons of an offensive nature were found on board any of the vessels of the flotilla, said the report. Yet Israeli soldiers used live ammunition against the passengers of the Mavi Marmara, killing nine and injuring over 50: "Six of the deceased were the victims of summary executions, two of whom were shot after they were severely injured," said the report. Despite Israeli and US pressure, the UNHRC is expected to endorse a draft resolution by Turkey to adopt the committee's findings and refer them to the UN General Assembly. The vote, which is due either today or tomorrow, is expected to pass thanks largely to the support of Arab, Islamic, Asian and some African states sympathetic with the Palestinian cause. But this will probably be the end of the flotilla story as far as the UN is concerned. And while some media attention is currently being accorded the flotilla discussions going on in the UNHRC, the fate of the even more damning Goldstone Report is being all but ignored. Named after the head of the mission, the 575-page long Goldstone Report submitted to the UN in September 2009 recommended that both Israeli and Palestinian authorities undertake investigations into accusations of humanitarian violations and follow up with action within six months. If the parties failed to meet international standards of objectivity in their efforts, said the report, then the UN Security Council (UNSC) should consider referring the whole matter to the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. Faced with the report's damning evidence -- the bulk of it against Israel -- and bold recommendations, the UN General Assembly shirked the opportunity to take any meaningful action in its emergency session on 5 November 2009. Instead, and after many deferrals, it appointed a committee of experts last June to decide whether Israel and the Palestinians had conducted domestic investigations that met with international standards. The committee submitted its report to the UNHRC on Monday. Because Israel had refused to cooperate with its experts, it said, it was not in a position to make any decision on the matter. While such an outcome might reasonably be expected to have provoked protests from the Arab-Islamic bloc in the UNHRC, particularly the Palestinian Authority (PA), this does not appear to be the case. According to Jeremy Smith, director of the Geneva branch of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights (CIHR) which has been lobbying with other NGOs in favour of the Goldstone recommendations to take Israel to the ICC, the PA is instead seeking to extend the mandate of the expert committee for another year. "The problem here is that the PA's draft resolution is extremely weak and would seem to be burying the findings of the Goldstone Report," Smith told Al-Ahram Weekly in a telephone interview from Geneva on Tuesday. CIHR's director in Cairo, Bahieddin Hassan, put it as follows: "The difference between the PA and both Israel and the US is that the latter want to bury the Goldstone Report immediately, while the PA wants to do it slowly. This is what's happening at the UNHRC at the moment." One irony of the situation, says Smith, is that the Goldstone Report is being overshadowed by discussions on the findings of the flotilla fact-finding mission. On the other hand, the status of the Goldstone Report has become so complicated "nobody knows where the process is going anymore." "Everyone is confused. It keeps getting deferred. This was the strongest movement we had to uphold justice for the Palestinians in 50 years and it is being buried by bureaucracy. Where is the Goldstone Report now? Why is it being buried?" he asks. Legal experts say the PA could have drafted a strong resolution demanding action which the UNHRC would almost certainly have passed given its Arab-Islamic majority. This would have then empowered the UNHRC to refer the resolution to the UN General Assembly which could opt, if it so wishes, to pass the resolution on to the Security Council. And while the Security Council would never adopt a resolution that would see Israel before the ICC, such a scenario would have had inestimable value in drawing international attention to daily Israeli abuses of Palestinian rights. But neither the PA, nor the Arab League or the Organisation of Islamic Countries, all of them members of the UNHRC, drafted such a resolution. "The apparent lack of political will among the PA, the Arab League and OIC should be questioned and analysed. It's very important to shed light on this area," says Smith. He believes their strategy is "to complicate the process in layers of bureaucracy until it is forgotten or just too confusing to follow". The Cairo Institute for Human Rights and four Palestinian NGOs issued a joint press statement on Tuesday condemning the failure of "all responsible parties" -- a reference to the PA, the Arab League and the OIC -- to comply with their obligation to carry out genuine investigations.
