UN Replaces Schabas with Goldstone Report Judge
February 3, 2015William Schabas stepped down from leading the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) “war crimes” probe against Israel on Monday over concerns his documented bias could “harm the findings” of the report, but just one day later a replacement has been found – a judge from the infamous Goldstone Report.
UNHRC spokesman Rolando Gomez said earlier on Tuesday that the commission, which is due to present its findings next month, is in “the final phase of collecting evidence” and could name a new chairman as early as Tuesday.
Indeed the UN body lost no time, and later on Tuesday appointed Mary McGowan Davis, already a member of the inquiry, to succeed Schabas, according to AFP.
McGowan Davis, a former New York judge, was part of the 2009 Goldstone committee which accused Israel of “war crimes” in the 2008-9 counter-terror Operation Cast Lead.
Israel rejected the findings of the report which was widely assessed as being blatantly biased and incomplete, and even Judge Richard Goldstone, who led the committee, later retracted the core accusation of “war crimes” leveled in the report.
McGowan Davis served on the supreme court of the state of New York from 1986 to 1998. In 2004 and 2005, she worked in Afghanistan’s public defenders’ office, and has also been involved in war crimes justice projects in Sierra Leone, Cambodia and Rwanda.
Even before the appointment of Schabas’s replacement, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beytenu) noted Tuesday that the resignation would make little difference to the inquiry’s outcome.
“It won’t change the committee’s report’s conclusions, which were biased in advance in accordance with the body that formed the committee, whose sole purpose is attacking and harming Israel,” he said.
Schabas stepped down after it came out that he had worked as a consultant for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist group in October 2012.
“After the resignation of the committee chairman who was biased against Israel, the report that was written at the behest of the UN Human Rights Council – an anti-Israel body, the decisions of which prove it has nothing to do with human rights – needs to be shelved,” Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said.
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