UN human rights chief “shocked” at US boycott of racism summit

The UN’s highest authority on human rights said she was “shocked and deeply disappointed” at a US decision to boycott the Durban Review Conference against racism, which opens on Monday in Geneva.

"I am shocked and deeply disappointed by the United States decision not to attend a conference that aims to combat racism, xenophobia, racial discrimination and other forms of intolerance worldwide," said UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay in a statement released on the conference’s official website on Sunday.

US president Barack Obama confirmed on Sunday that the US would join Australia, Canada, Israel and Italy in refusing to attend the meeting, which is aimed at reviewing goals set out in Durban, South Africa in 2001.

The US and Israel stormed out of the original Durban summit over remarks that identified Israel as a perpetrator of racism towards Palestinians.

The 64-page Declaration and Program of Action (DDPA) endorsed at the conference affirms “the inalienable right of the Palestinian people to self-determination and to the establishment of an independent State.” The document also says that “the Holocaust must never be forgotten.”

Though the 17-page document for this year’s review conference removes all references to the Palestinians, the US says the current draft does not go far enough by not negating the offending sections of the 2001 declaration.

"I would love to be involved in a useful conference that addressed continuing issues of racism and discrimination around the globe," Obama said in Trinidad on Sunday after attending the Summit of the Americas, according to AP.

But he said the draft declaration reaffirms the whole of the document from the 2001 summit at which "folks expressed antagonism toward Israel in ways that were often times completely hypocritical and counterproductive."

"We expressed in the run-up to this conference our concerns that if you adopted all of the language from 2001, that's not something we can sign up for," Obama said, according to AP.

UN High Commissioner Pillay responded to this concern in her statement, saying, "I believe that difficulty could have been overcome. It would have been possible to make it clear in a footnote that the US had not affirmed the original document and therefore is not in a position to reaffirm it, which is a routine practice in multilateral negotiations to enable consensus-building while allowing for individual positions to be expressed. … And then we could have all moved on together, and put the problems of 2001 behind us."

"I fail to see why, given that the Middle East is not mentioned in this document, that politics related to the Middle East continue to intrude into the process," Pillay said.

Source: Maan News Agency