New York: Following a Libyan initiative to keep the Goldstone report on Israeli war crimes on the Security Council table, the Council has decided to hold an open debate on the report next week.
"We have to keep the momentum going," Abdurrahman Mohamed Shalgam, Libya`s Ambassador to UN, told reporters, following a special closed-door session of the Security Council.
The Libyan initiative is supported by the Arab League, Organisation of the Islamic Conference, and the Non-Aligned Movement, according to Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, the Sudanese Ambassador to the UN who spoke on behalf of the Arab Group.
"The group decided that the report should be operationalised and not sidelined," he said.
The Sudanese diplomat pointed out that that the Security Council track record is based on "double standards and selectivity," and added that if the Council failed to act on the recommendations made on the report the matter would be taken to the General Assembly.
"It is our collective desire to see that the recommendations in the report being implemented," he said.
The report released on September 15, by the UN Fact Finding Mission, headed by South African judge Richard Goldstone, finds strong evidence of war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the Israeli forces during the military assault that lasted from December 2008 to January 2009, and claimed more than 1,400 lives.
The main recommendation of the Mission for the Security Council is to make Israel report within six months on prosecutions it carries. If the relevant authorities fail in this task, the Council should refer the matter to the prosecutor of International Criminal Court (ICC).
Soon after its release, the US has called the Goldstone report "one-sided" and said that the matter should be dealt by the Human Rights Council in Geneva where the resolution forming the Mission was passed.
Speaking at the UN in September, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, said, "We believe that the mandate for the Goldstone report was one-sided and that many of the recommendations are appropriately dealt with by the institutions within Israel."
Last week, under pressure from the US that favours focusing on the peace process, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, withdrew support for a vote in the Human Rights Council resolution to send the report to the General Assembly for consideration. The matter has been postponed till March.
Speaking after the Libyan and Sudanese diplomat, the US second in command at the UN, Alejandro Wolff, emphasised that the open-debate session was not an emergency meeting but the monthly meeting of the Security Council that convenes to discuss the Middle East situation and had been called forward from October 20.
Describing the mandate of the report as, "flawed, one-sided and unacceptable," Wolff also underlined that the debate did not mean that the matter was being taken up by the Security Council.
"The report needs to be discussed by the Human Rights Council," he stressed, several times.
Bureau Report
