US Senate to UN: Rescind Goldstone Report
LAST UPDATED: 04/15/2011 08:10
Senate unanimously passes resolution calling on UNHRC "to reflect the author's repudiation of the Goldstone report's central findings."
Judge Richard Goldstone Photo: REUTERS
The
US Senate unanimously approved a resolution on Thursday which called on
the United Nations to rescind the Goldstone Commission's report on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip in December 2008 and January 2009, AFP reported.
The resolution called on
the UN Human Rights Council "to reflect the author's repudiation of the
Goldstone report's central findings, rescind the report and reconsider
further Council actions with respect to the report's findings."
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The
resolution urged UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon to "do all in his
power to redress the damage to Israel's reputation" and to "reform" the
HRC "so that it no longer unfairly, disproportionately and falsely
criticizes Israel on a regular basis."
Earlier Thursday, three co-authors of the report on Gaza said they stood
firmly behind their work and rejected recent calls to reconsider or retract the
document.
“The report of the [2009] fact-finding mission contains the
conclusions made after diligent, independent and objective consideration of the
information related to the events within our mandate, and careful assessment of
its reliability and credibility,” they said. “We firmly stand by these
conclusions,” the trio wrote in a letter they published in The Guardian
newspaper.
The three mission members, attorney Hina Jilani of Pakistan,
Prof. Christine Chinkin of Britain (she also holds Australian citizenship), and
Col. (ret.) Desmond Travers of Ireland, spoke out after their former chairman,
Judge Richard Goldstone, wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post on April
1 saying that “if I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would
have been a different document.”
In that piece, Goldstone wrote that the
report erroneously accused Israel of intentionally targeting civilians in Gaza
during Cast Lead.
He also
wrote that he concurred with a follow-up UN report that stated that Israel had
investigated, transparently and in good faith, allegations made in the Goldstone
Report, while Hamas “has done nothing.”