Media, human rights and agendas

The trend for media to cover reports from human rights law organizations and officials as if they are objective and have no agenda is problematic, according to NGO monitoring organizations and Foreign Ministry officials.

The accusations came out of Bar-Ilan University’s conference in Ramat Gan Wednesday on human rights organizations, the media and Israel.

While praising the honest dialogue and appraisals on both sides of the debate at the conference itself, NGO Monitor president Gerald Steinberg said the trend is so problematic that NGOs should have an ethical code of conduct, as the media do.

The code of conduct should include an enforcement mechanism or ombudsman that would combine independent observers with volunteers from the NGOs themselves to hold them to a greater standard of objectivity, Steinberg said.

Why is this necessary? According to Steinberg, most NGOs that cover Israel have been “taken over by an ideological agenda.”

Despite this, he said the media do not check the veracity of and often overly dramatize the findings of NGOs regarding human rights law.

For example, Steinberg said the UN’s 2009 Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip was essentially an amalgamation of reports from around 50 human rights law organizations, accepting the organizations’ findings as objective both regarding factual and legal issues.

While Steinberg views media coverage of these organizations as not critical enough, he points out that at least with the media there is a journalists association where one can file complaints.

In fact, Steinberg said NGO Monitor has filed such complaints and they have been adjudicated.

Daniel Meron, head of the UN and International Organizations Bureau in the Foreign Ministry who also spoke at the conference, concurred, focusing on noncritical reporting of UN human rights law officials.

He noted a recent press conference given by the UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, Richard Falk, in which the media reported on his statement, but did not “expose” Falk’s “hypocrisy” and “background.”

As for that background, Meron said that Falk has shattered any veil of neutrality by openly supporting anti-Israel divestment campaigns, has associated Israel with Nazism, and has associated Israel’s government with state-sponsored terrorism.

On a separate note, Meron said he found it highly problematic that the media give so much attention to UN officials’ criticism of Israel, whereas Israel’s UN Ambassador Ron Prosor submits a complaint after each rocket is fired into Israel, events that are generally ignored if they are not part of a larger escalation.

Meron called on the media, NGOs and the UN to “tell the truth,” saying that Israel gets “much more scrutiny than the rest of the world.”

A glaring example recent example of the phenomena could be a recent story by Ruth Pollard of the Sydney Morning Herald covering human rights law reports on the Israeli military justice system’s treatment of Palestinian child-offenders.

The article purports to discuss two recent human rights reports, one by Defense of Children International and another by a group of eminent British lawyers.

The Defense of Children International report is entirely based on the testimonies of Palestinian children convicted of crimes. While no justice system is perfect, few nations would evaluate their justice system’s accepting the narratives of those found guilty of crimes as the starting or virtually sole point of view.

The British lawyers’ report, on the other hand, while overall not favorable to Israel in its conclusions, cited Israeli governmental sources alongside those of human rights law organizations, refusing in most instances to pronounce judgment on which was correct where there were conflicting accounts.

Thus, the British lawyers’ report cited statistics on both sides of the argument, including noting that in interrogations in 51 criminal cases involving Palestinian children, 48 out of the 51 interrogations were either audio or videotaped or provided an Arabic transcript- translation to the accused and the accused’s attorney. Of the last three, two were freed without need for trial, and there was a mechanical failure in the third case’s recording equipment.

Generally, the report noted that more than 70 percent of the cases were audio or videotaped.

Despite rampant accusations in the Sydney Morning Herald article of mistreatment of Palestinian children, it would appear that a justice system trying to cover up abuses would not be striving for such results in accountability.

The British lawyers’ report did not say that Israel flagrantly ignores international law across the board, and indicated where it believed Israel did meet international law and was making serious efforts to do so.

Overall, the report’s criticism on this issue was that aspirationally, the system would be better and closer to the British system if videotaping occurred in all cases, though this is not an international law requirement, and the report did not say it was.

This is critical, as part of the accusation against media coverage of human rights law reports is that both groups sometimes blur the difference between an ideal that should be strived for and what is required to avoid violations of international law.

This, the British lawyers’ report does not accept many non-statistical Israeli arguments, such as the impact of anti-Israel ideology and the hostile-environment aspect of the West Bank to Israeli law enforcement, in making judgments, but it does not paint practices it merely disagrees with as violating international law.

There are many such examples in the frequently evenhanded British lawyers’ report, but none of these nuanced facts or statistics made it into the Sydney Morning Herald article.

Rather, it references the two reports as if they were the same, makes a conclusory statement about a series of matter-of-fact international law violations by Israel, and then ignores the reports, mostly telling a few stories from a third report from the group Breaking the Silence that, like the Defense of Children International report, is a one-sided account, although in this case the testimony is given by approximately 30 former soldiers who, speaking anonymously, ostensibly regret their “misdeeds.”

This returns to Steinberg’s and Meron’s arguments in general about problematic trends in the lack of critical coverage of NGOs, and more specifically to Steinberg’s proposal for an ombudsman who could hold NGOs accountable for factual and legal errors, since they are viewed as such a source of objectivity.