Tag: human rights

During a recent trip to Rwanda, former president Bill Clinton lamented his failure in 1994 to intervene in that country’s genocidal massacres. “I don’t think we could have ended the violence, but I think we could have cut it down. And I regret it.”

Yuval Shany, an Israeli professor, was named to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.

Iran was elected to a top post on the UN Arms Trade Treaty conference, UN Watch revealed on Sunday. The Geneva-based human rights group is calling on UN chief Ban Ki-moon, who addressed the conference on the same day, to condemn the selection of the Tehran regime.

UNHRC on Friday named three women to the panel, one accused Israel of "total discrimination," another's sister served on the Goldstone commission.

The United Nations' top human rights body has appointed three independent experts to conduct a fact-finding mission on how Israel's Jewish settlements affect Palestinians. The...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s welcome on the sunny Ipanema beach in Rio was less than warm from an eclectic group of Jews, human rights activists, and homosexuals, who arrived Sunday to protest the Iranian president’s attendance at a UN summit on sustainable development.

The Palestinians have been radicalized to a point where it is almost impossible to talk about peace and coexistence with Israel. For Palestinians, the true heroes are suicide bombers who blew themselves up in cafes and buses, killing innocent civilians. Peace activists, human rights advocates, moderates, journalists and reformers have almost no say and are often denounced as "traitors" and a "fifth column."

At the end of a week in which the United Church of Canada, that country's largest Protestant denomination called for a boycott of goods produced in “illegal” Israeli settlements, including East Jerusalem, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird declared that "Israel has no greater friend in the world today than Canada." Baird was addressing the American Jewish Committee World Leaders Plenary in D.C.

Israel's Foreign Ministry criticized as "absurd" the country's inclusion on a list of countries that restricts the activities of human rights and advocacy groups. Monday's...

President Obama recently unveiled the Atrocities Prevention Board, and appointed Samantha Power as its head; the same Samantha Power that has called Israel a "major human rights abuser." This is only one of the many troubling aspects of this new initiative.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has announced that Israel had severed all working relations with the UN Human Rights Council as of Monday this week, and will block a U.N. fact finding team from entering Israel or Judea and Samaria to investigate Jewish settlements. Spokesman Yigal Palmor said this "means that we're not going to work with them. We're not going to let them carry out any kind of mission, including this probe."

80% of all 2010 UN resolutions criticizing specific countries for human rights violations were directed at Israel. Only six other UN members faced human rights criticism at all, one of which was the United States. The HRC subjected the USA to harsh criticism – by Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Russia – for, supposed, human rights violations. The HRC criticized the elimination of Bin-Laden and Israel’s defense against PLO, Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.

As sponsors of the upcoming J Street conference, B'Tselem has had to explain to its Palestinian allies how it can be part of an event featuring as keynote speaker former PM Ehud Olmert, "the Butcher of Gaza." B'Tselem's response was typical – a lot of backpedaling and revisions. But what works for the op-ed pages of Ha'aretz and the NY Times does not wash with the Palestinian Center for Human Rights…

The "Arab Spring" is anything but a "great revolution." It is a spring of massacres, destruction and violence, as Patriarch Beshara al-Rai, the head of Lebanon's Maronite Church, put it. "We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence, war, destruction and killing," he told Reuters. "This is turning to winter. We cannot implement reforms by force and arms. How can it be an Arab Spring when people are being killed every day?"

The Supreme Court’s interventionist approach was pioneered by Aharon Barak, who served as the court’s president from 1995 till 2006. Dorit Beinisch, who is retiring from the court this week after serving as president since her mentor's retirement, upheld the tradition of judicial activism, keeping the court at the center of Israeli public debate and making it a lightning rod for Orthodox and right-wing critics. That could change as Beinisch is replaced by Asher Grunis, a conservative justice who has made a name for himself as a supporter of judicial restraint.

Robert Bernstein, founder of Human Rights Watch, has established a new organization called Advancing Human Rights, with Irwin Cotler and David Keyes on the Board of Directors.

It's been a while since we've read this kind of foaming-at-the-mouth attack on Prof. Alan Dershowitz. He must be doing something right.

The organization "Rabbis for Human Rights’ knows exactly how to condemn the State of Israel and its authorities for any action against a Palestinian. Yet, when it comes to a letter which condemns the actions of the Palestinian Authority, the Rabbis for Human Rights would prefer not to be in conflict with Palestinian activists.

Judge: "Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide."

Do you ever get the feeling you're really living in a television program? For 2011 America, the rerun we are collectively forced to act in is "That '70s Show."

If Toni Morrison, the Nobel-prize winning African-American novelist, could refer to Bill Clinton, a white man, as America's first black president, then surely we can take a reverse tack: Is it possible that Barack Obama is not the first real black president after all?

In our day, when news events do not always portray the Jewish community in the most favorable light, it is imperative that we have role models we can emulate. The recent passing of a famous legal scholar brings to mind two individuals who personify this description.

WASHINGTON - The Goldstone wars continue, but beneath the shouting a diplomatic track has emerged.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan had a temper tantrum at the Davos forum on world economics.

As a shrewd and brutal ploy to break up Georgia, Putin's Russia is in the process of inventing a new "nation in need of "self-determination.

Some years ago, following one of the devastating suicide bombings in which small Jewish children were blown to bits, prominent Palestinian columnist Fahd al-Rimawi - then writing with obvious approval of Nobel Peace laureate Yassir Arafat in Amman's al-Majd newspaper, gleefully celebrated the monstrous act of terror:

      "A democracy must fight terror with one hand tied behind its back."       So stated Aharon Barak, the former president of Israel's Supreme Court...

The Olmert government's September 29 decision to define the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip as a "hostile entity" was greeted with quite a few raised eyebrows.

At the genesis of our history, we encountered the heathen prophet, Bilaam, who was bent upon cursing our people. But despite himself, G-d placed blessings on his lips, and to this very day, we repeat those blessings in our prayers. Many centuries have passed since Bilaam spoke, but alas, evil people remain - people who are determined to curse us. But like Bilaam of old, despite themselves, they sing our praises. So it was when Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, one of the third world's most popular statesmen, addressed the leaders of 57 Islamic nations at a conference that he was hosting.