UN General Assembly Plenary Session on Goldstone Report scheduled for today

As reported yesterday in the article published on Maan News and written by Curtis Doebbler, an international human rights lawyer and professor of law at An-Najah National University in Nablus, “the verdict of the most representative organ of the 192 states of world body will be a test of the courage and the will of the international community”. (see the full article on http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDet...

A lot of lies and deformations have surrounded the UN Goldstone Report: Israel, USA and other countries have manoeuvred in order to dismiss the Report and to defeat any actions on it. Israel decided not to cooperate with the investigation and claimed that the report and its results would be biased.

The draft resolution, that will be discussed tomorrow, would require UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to bring investigative document to the Security Council. What will emerge from UN General Assembly tomorrow, in the end?

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, a new EU- French initiative is calling in these hours on Israel and PA (the Palestinian Authority) to assume independent investigations into allegations of war crimes in Gaza, in order to assure that the Goldstone Report will not reach the Security Council or the International Criminal Court.

In these same hours US Congress would probably pass a resolution calling on President Obama to do all the efforts to “bury” the Report, unequivocally opposing any approval or further examination of the document. Jurist Richard Goldstone responded to the bipartisan resolution introduced in the US House of Representatives with a document examining the resolution (H.Res. 867) point by point.

See the document on http://www.baird.house.gov/images/s...

An article by Deputy Robert Baird, published on Roll Call, one of the most popular political newspapers in Washington, analyses the reasons why Israel and Gaza deserve a better resolution from the Congress. Deputy Robert Baird asked his colleagues “What will it say about this Congress and our country if we so readily seek to block "any further consideration" of a human rights investigation produced by one of the most respected jurists in the world today, a man who led the investigations of abuses in South Africa, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Kosovo and worked to identify and prosecute Nazi war criminals as a member of the Panel of the Commission of Enquiry into the Activities of Nazism in Argentina?”

We will see.

Read the article on:

http://www.baird.house.gov/index.ph...

*House Rep. Brian Baird represents the US state of Washington’s 3rd district.