MUST READ: Why the Schabas Report Will Be Every Bit as Biased as the Goldstone Report (Hillel Neuer)

This is the must-read article of the day, from The Tower. Excerpts:

For more than five years, the question of who exactly authored the UN’s 2009 Goldstone Report has been an enduring mystery. The report, written under the auspices of South African Judge Richard Goldstone, was a shocking 500-page indictment of Israel that accused its political and military leadership of deliberately targeting Palestinian civilians during the 2008-2009 Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and condemned the Jewish state as a whole for systematic and institutionalized racism, among other atrocities and abominations.

The answer to that riddle—which involves a radical Marxist law professor who held the equivalent of a general’s rank in the global lawfare movement against Israel, and more broadly, the UN department that selected her—has additional importance today because of the controversy swirling over the upcoming sequel to the Goldstone Report dealing with 2014’s Operation Protective Edge, which will be presented to the UN Human Rights Council (HRC) in Geneva on March 23.

Understanding who wrote the 2009 report—and how the establishment behind it remains in place—constitutes a direct rebuttal to the latest campaign by HRC backers and activist groups to salvage the reputation and legitimacy of the Goldstone II commission of inquiry into alleged Israeli war crimes.

[W]hat no one has understood or appreciated until now is the decisive role in the “process”—to use the words of the current HRC president—played by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).
To understand the OHCHR, one must understand the close relationship between two distinct but closely related UN entities. One is the 47-nation Human Rights Council, a political body heavily influenced by the vote-trading power and petrodollars of the Arab and Islamic states. It meets regularly three times a year for month-long sessions.

At the Arab states’ initiative, and with varying degrees of complicity by the EU and others, half of the resolutions passed by the HRC condemn Israel; there is a special agenda item against Israel at every HRC meeting; and the HRC has produced more emergency sessions and inquiries against Israel than any other country in the world.

The OHCHR is based nearby in Geneva. It is a thousand-strong bureaucracy that serves the council by carrying out its investigations, writing requested reports, staffing the council sessions, and acting year-round as its secretariat. From 2008 until this summer, the office was headed by High Commissioner Navi Pillay, who famously said that “the Israeli Government treats international law with perpetual disdain.”

Those who work in the OHCHR see themselves as an independent and neutral agency of the UN dedicated to promoting and protecting human rights. ....

From time to time, some OHCHR bureaucrats act on the margins, and only in small ways, to try to resist the more absurd and harmful dictates they receive from the political body. Yet when it comes to Israel, the position of the OHCHR under Navi Pillay has been more in line with the HRC than ever before. The most inflammatory and vitriolic notes from Arab speeches delivered to the council find their echo in the reports drafted by European nationals working for the OHCHR, many of whom are graduates of British universities and come from organizations like Amnesty International. If that weren’t enough, their work is subject to the scrutiny and constant pressure exerted by the 56-nation Islamic bloc.

Something that is vital to understand about UN commissions of inquiry is that, in practice, their commissioners don’t write the resulting report. The secretariat does. To be sure, some commissioners may provide directions and revisions—and it is clear that Schabas would have been more hands-on than others—but the bulk of the work is performed by a professional staff that can be comprised of human rights officers, forensics experts, and lawyers. As a result of this, chief-of-staff Marotta had the power to oversee the entire [Goldstone] project.

Thus, through [Francesca ] Marotta, senior officials within the OHCHR would have had the ability to exercise influence over the report—officials like Mona Rishmawi, a Palestinian lawyer who, prior to joining the OHCHR, had written articles comparing Israelis to Nazis.

The role of Marotta and the OHCHR was known at the time, if not fully appreciated. What a probe by UN Watch has now revealed, however, is that outside staff recruited by OHCHR included some of the most radical anti-Israel activists in the world.

One of the known staff members was Sareta Ashraph, whose job, as she described it, was to assist in the investigations, conduct interviews with victims and witnesses, and gather exhibits. Ashraph has also revealed that she was “responsible for drafting several chapters of the final report.”

When it comes to Israel, Ashraph is, to put it mildly, less than impartial. She was and remains a member of Amnesty International, one of the leading groups accusing Israel of war crimes in 2009, and which pushed for and defended the UN inquiry. She was the main organizer of a London lecture on behalf of Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights, featuring anti-Israel lawfare activists Raji Sourani (head of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights) and Daniel Machover. She also worked in the West Bank on “investigations of allegations of violations of international humanitarian law following ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002.”

What has not been known until now is that the other key figure on the staff was, through her substantial anti-Israel publications, activism, and leadership role in waging lawfare, exponentially more problematic—someone whose life’s dream was to prosecute Israelis for war crimes and who devoted several years of her life to making this dream come true.

Grietje Baars [is]a Dutch-born law professor who teaches in London. In contrast to Ashraph, who in the immediate aftermath of the report wrote in detail about her role in the Goldstone Report, Baars took pains to obscure her participation.

It is easy to see why. If people knew who Baars was and her role in the report, there would have been justified outrage at OHCHR for selecting her.

The world has the right to know the identities and roles of people involved in writing Goldstone II, to prevent a repeated of the biased staffers of Goldstone I.

[W]hen OHCHR hired her to work on the Goldstone Report, they must have known about Baars’ scholarship. They must have known that she was a self-described Marxist whose doctoral thesis was “a radical Marxist critique of law and capitalism,” and that her academic focus included “anti-occupation struggles and their intersection with other solidarity/liberation struggles” such as “anti-capitalism, anarchism, animal, and queer liberation.”

OHCHR would certainly have known of Baars’ prominent advocacy scholarship against Israel, such as her 2007 law journal article in the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, entitled “Corrie et al. v Caterpillar: Litigating Corporate Complicity in Israeli Violations of International Law in the US Courts.” The article analyzes case law and suggests best practices regarding Palestinian lawfare efforts against Israel and the movement to boycott companies doing business with Israel, with numerous comparisons to the Nuremberg trials against the Nazis. Publications by Baars subsequent to her time on the Goldstone Report have also accused Israel of “war crimes, crimes against humanity, and grave breaches.”

But OHCHR must also have known that Baars was much more than a scholar: She was a hardcore anti-Israel activist who has risen to become a leading figure in the global lawfare movement—a worldwide campaign to erode Israel’s international standing through the misuse of the language and mechanisms of international law, with the goal of blunting Israel’s ability to defend itself by putting the country on notice that any measures taken against terrorists based among civilians will be put under an international microscope.

By 2009, Baars already had a disturbing track record of extreme hostility against Israel. Because of the sensitive nature of her position, OHCHR must have examined her resume and conducted a basic Google search, all of which would have revealed her prejudice and made it clear that prosecuting Israelis in international courts was essentially her life’s dream. In other words, that she was the very opposite of the impartial, neutral, and objective member of the secretariat envisioned under the UN Charter.

An email Baars sent to her activist colleagues as the Gaza conflict unfolded in December 2008—the war she would later investigate for the Goldstone Commission—preemptively declared that Israel was conducting a “massacre” in the territory and ranted about Israeli “lies we have to fight.”

Baars sent the email after receiving a purportedly leaked copy of guidelines for pro-Israel spokespeople responding to questions about the incursion. “These are the lies we have to fight to end the massacre in Gaza,” her email says. “This has been leaked from sources in Washington DC. Please study this and prepare a response as defiantly yet respectfully as you can do. This is easy to trash, but do so in a civil manner please. Outrage is our weapon, but respect is our salvation.”

Beyond what it says about the credibility of the Goldstone Report, Baars’ involvement raises serious questions about the impartiality of OHCHR, which filled the inquiry’s secretariat with a mixture of its own staffers and outside hires. Why has it refused to reveal the make-up of the secretariat, leaving the public in the dark except for a few names that have inadvertently leaked out?

There seems no question that Goldstone was duped. He never suspected that OHCHR, the UN agency in charge of providing him with professional staff support, had quietly embedded one of the world’s top anti-Israel lawfare strategists into the team. After all, only four years before, Goldstone had worked on another UN inquiry on the oil-for-food program. In that case, he was supported by a highly professional staff based in New York, with most if not all of them lawyers and experts hired from the outside. Goldstone assumed the Gaza inquiry would be the same.

But it was not the same. The culture of the Geneva-based OHCHR secretariat is known to be far more anti-American, anti-colonial, and anti-Israel than the one in New York. In his naiveté, Goldstone was blind to the prejudice and political agenda of his own bureaucracy. Indeed, there is not the slightest indication that Goldstone had any knowledge of Baars’ extremist activism. But OHCHR knew—and that is why they hired her.

What do we know so far about the actual staff members of Goldstone II? As in 2009, OHCHR refuses to respect the principle of transparency by revealing who is on the staff, even though this is common practice elsewhere, such as in the UN’s 2005 oil-for-food report.

I have seen this bias with my own eyes. When I met with the Schabas Commission on September 17, 2014 to personally hand them a written demand for Schabas’ recusal, there were only two staff members in the room, both of them from OHCHR’s Arab section, known as Middle East and North Africa: One was Frej Fenniche, a Tunisian who was a spokesman for the UN’s notoriously anti-Semitic Durban conference on racism in 2001. The other was Sara Hammood, a former spokesperson for the UN’s most anti-Israel committee. Hamood also worked as a “policy advisor on Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory” for Oxfam Novib, where she wrote one-sided reports and joined others in critical statements against Israel. This was the initial staff of OHCHR, who were presumably involved in hiring the others.

The current staff—Schabas has mentioned that it is composed of “a dozen specialists”—includes Karin Lucke, OHCHR’s former coordinator of the Arab region team, and now listed as working for the UN in New York. Amnesty notes that the current team includes the OHCHR staff from “Geneva, Ramallah, and the Gaza Strip.” According to Geneva sources familiar with the probe, a number of the staff members are from the Arab world.
In summary, there is every reason to suspect that OHCHR has manipulated the staffing for Goldstone II just as it did in 2009.

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