Rule of law at the national and international levels – GA Sixth Cttee debate – Summary records (excerpts)

Sixth Committee 

Summary record of the 7th meeting 

Held at Headquarters, New York, on 11 October 2012, at 3 p.m. 

 Chair:  Mr. Sergeyev ……………………………………………….  (Ukraine) 

Contents 

Agenda item 83: The rule of law at the national and international levels (continued) 

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Agenda item 83: The rule of law at the national and international levels (continued) (A/66/749 and A/67/290) 

1.  Mr. Aljadey (Libya) … Libya supported Palestine’s request for full membership in the United Nations because it was the only country whose people were not justly represented in the Organization. 

2.  Ms. Diaz Mendoza (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela) …

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4.  … In view of the Security Council’s repeated breach of the rule of law, most blatantly through its adoption of resolution 1973 (2011) on the situation in Libya and its handling of the Palestinian question, her delegation had expressed its reservations concerning paragraph 28 of the Declaration of the High-level Meeting of the General Assembly on the Rule of Law at the National and International Levels (General Assembly resolution 67/1), in which it recognized the positive contribution of the Security Council to the rule of law.

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16.  Mr. Zeidan (Observer for Palestine) said that the Committee had been informed of his country’s progress on strengthening the rule of law and its highly praised institution-building programme. However, Israel’s impunity for its 45-year illegal occupation of the Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, severely undermined the rule of law. The Committee had been warned of the illegal siege on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and the rapid expansion of Israel’s illegal settlement enterprise, which affected every aspect of Palestinian life: water, worship, agriculture, access and movement, and even the right to life. Palestine held Israel fully accountable for the acts of terrorism committed by the illegal settlers. The occupying Power’s transfer of parts of its own population to the Occupied Palestinian Territory represented a clear violation of article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention and a war crime under article 8 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In that regard, he welcomed the initiatives of many States to begin labelling Israeli settlement products as such and encouraged others to do likewise. 

17.  Palestine had been seeking to bring an end to Israeli colonization and occupation of its land and to create an appropriate environment for genuine peace negotiations for the achievement of the two-State solution in accordance with international law. Unfortunately, because of the continued impunity Israel enjoyed in the Security Council, it had yet to comply with the demands of the international community expressed most evidently in the annual resolutions of the General Assembly.

18.  It had been over a year since Palestine had submitted an application for United Nations membership. His delegation called on the Security Council to make a positive recommendation to the General Assembly in accordance with Article 4 of the Charter and in keeping with the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of 28 May 1948 on Admission of a State to the United Nations. With respect to another membership issue, in recent months there had been an effort to thwart Palestine’s participation in various international conferences held under the auspices of the United Nations. As a member of one specialized agency, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, Palestine was entitled to participate in such conferences under the “all States” and “Vienna” formulas. 

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27.  Ms. Schonmann (Israel), speaking in exercise of the right of reply, …

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29.  Lastly, with regard to the distinguished Palestinian observer, for every claim he had raised she could readily provide compelling arguments to the contrary. In the appropriate forum she could offer solid evidence of the atrocities, war crimes and crimes against humanity that the Palestinians had committed against Israelis and against their own people. Countless Israelis had been victims of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and continued to be the targets of rocket and mortar attacks from the Gaza Strip, which was controlled by the Hamas terrorist organization. Equally troubling, the Palestinian representative had failed to mention the human rights abuses by the security apparatus in the West Bank, let alone the widespread human rights violations by the rulers in Gaza, who had diverted every resource to oppressing their own people or attacking the people of Israel. Women were subjugated, political opponents were jailed and murdered, and children were used as human shields and bombers.

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31.  Mr. AlAjmi (Kuwait) reiterated that Israel was violating United Nations resolutions, international law and international humanitarian law by threatening peace and security in the Middle East and by continuing its policy of establishing new settlements in the West Bank in an attempt to change its demographic composition. 

32.  Mr. Zeidan (Observer for Palestine) said that Israel was an apartheid State that discriminated against non-Jews, even with respect to such basic services as water and housing. The representative of Israel had the benefit of specific domestic laws in her own country, while her Government practiced terrorism against others. Her memory was short: only recently undercover Israeli police officers had shot a Palestinian man walking through the olive groves. The Jewish settlements thrived on a terrorist ideology; settlers attacked Israeli army bases and desecrated Palestinian churches and mosques. The representative of Israeli had failed to mention the exodus of 800,000 Palestinians from their homes, the 45 years of Israeli occupation of Palestine or the opinion of the International Court of Justice with regard to that occupation. 

33.  Mr. Aldahhak (Syrian Arab Republic) said that if anyone was audacious, it was the representative of Israel, who dared to give lessons on the rule of law when it had been a well-documented violator of the rule of law since its establishment. Its history of war crimes and crimes against humanity, its massacres of Arabs in Palestine, Lebanon and other countries, were documented in international reports. The suffering of Syrians in the occupied Syrian Golan since 1967 continued. Israel had been practicing State terrorism, sometimes using passports issued by countries in North America and Europe. It desecrated Christian and Muslim religious sites, continued to expel Palestinians from their homeland and to blockade the Gaza Strip. One wondered how the representative of Israel could talk about women and children. It was ironical to hear lectures on the rule of law from the representative of a country that knew only the law of the jungle.

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The meeting rose at 6 p.m. 

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Corrections will be issued after the end of the session, in a separate corrigendum for each Committee.