Work of Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices – Secretary-General report

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 *A/70/150. 

1. The present report is submitted pursuant to General Assembly resolution 69/90. In line with paragraph 8 of that resolution, the Secretariat continued to provide the necessary facilities and staff to support the work of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Palestinian People and Other Arabs of the Occupied Territories. In 2015, the Special Committee was represented by three new members, Amrith Rohan Perera, Permanent Representative of Sri Lanka to the United Nations in New York; Ramlan Bin Ibrahim, Permanent Representative of Malaysia to the United Nations in New York; and Aboubacar Sadikh Barry, Minister Counsellor, Permanent Mission of Senegal to the United Nations Office at Geneva.

2. The Special Committee was directly supported in the fulfilment of its mandate by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), the Department of Safety and Security, the Department of Public Information and the office of the United Nations Resident Coordinator in Jordan. In addition, the Special Committee engaged with OHCHR in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

3. Much of the support was related to the Special Committee’s annual investigative mission to the region. In the light of the continuing practice of Israel of non-cooperation with the Special Committee, the latter was not able to visit the occupied territories. Moreover, in the light of the heightened security situation in the region, the Special Committee was not able to visit the Gaza Strip through Egypt at the Rafah crossing, as it had done in 2011 and 2012. The Special Committee therefore travelled to Amman from 4 to 9 August 2015. In addition, it held consultations with several Member States on 3 August 2015, in Geneva. During its mission to Amman, the Special Committee collected testimony and information from a number of victims, witnesses, officials and civil society representatives working on documenting and preventing violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in the occupied territories. These testimonies and briefings are recorded in the Special Committee’s report, to be transmitted by the Secretary-General to the General Assembly at its seventieth session.

Department of Public Information

4. Pursuant to paragraph 8 (d) of resolution 69/90, the activities set out below were undertaken by the Department of Public Information.

5. Coverage and promotion of the activities of the Special Committee remained an important aspect of the work of the Department of Public Information, which continued to regularly feature related developments and issues, using a wide spectrum of traditional means of communication and various social media platforms in different languages.

6. The concerns and activities of the Special Committee continued to be prominently covered on the United Nations News Centre portal, one of the most visited segments of the United Nations mega site, in the six official languages of the United Nations. News stories appearing on the United Nations News Centre platform were also distributed through the social media accounts, including Facebook and Twitter, via Rich Site Summary feeds, and by means of the portal’s e-mail news service subscription. In addition, United Nations News Centre stories were widely picked up by news aggregators around the world. The stories included statements by the Secretary-General and the Human Rights Council and discussions relating to the human rights situation in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, particularly, but not exclusively, during the 2014 conflict in Gaza.

7. The work of the Special Committee, issues pertaining to the human rights situation in the occupied territories, and the related activities of United Nations agencies, funds and programmes, such as UNRWA, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the United Nations Children’s Fund and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, continued to be promoted through the United Nations website in the six official languages. Arabic language versions of the Special Committee’s work received particular prominence and, through the social media, reached some 400,000 followers on the Department’s Arabic social media accounts.

8. The Department’s Meetings Coverage Section provided coverage of the Special Committee’s reports when they were taken up by the Special Political and Decolonization Committee (Fourth Committee) and by the General Assembly. In that context, the Meetings Coverage Section issued a total of eight press releases in English and French during the reporting period. The Media and Accreditation and Liaison Unit, together with the associated Media Documents Centre, e-mailed the Special Committee’s documents and related press releases to their clients and used social media to inform their followers about the Special Committee’s activities.