US seeks Israeli inquiry into army's Gaza actions to avoid war crime trial

Michael Posner, US assistant secretary of state, delivers his speech during the interactive dialogue with the fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict during a session of the Human Rights Council at the UN European headquarters in Geneva.
Photograph: APCHRIS STEPHEN

THE UNITED States yesterday called on Israel to hold investigations into the conduct of its forces in Gaza after a United Nations report blamed them for widespread atrocities.

Michael Posner, US assistant secretary of state, said the report, debated yesterday by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, made it essential for Israel to hold its forces to account.

“We encourage Israel to utilise appropriate domestic review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow up on credible allegations,” said Mr Posner.

His call came as a British court delayed a decision on an appeal by local pro-Palestinian groups to issue a war crimes arrest warrant against visiting Israeli defence minister Ehud Barak.

Mr Posner, speaking in Geneva, also called on Hamas to launch a similar inquiry into the firing of rockets into Israel during fighting in January. The US hopes its support for Israeli investigations will head off calls for international war crimes trials over the Gaza conflict which has widespread support on the Human Rights Council.

Some US diplomats fear that war crimes trials along the lines of those held for the Balkans and Rwanda would stall hopes of a new Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Justice Goldstone welcomed America’s call for investigations, saying: “I think that’s important support.“  He said a “crisis point” had been reached because of a lack of accountability for war crimes committed in the Middle East. “A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long.”

Sara Darehshori, author of a recent report by New York-based Human Rights Watch on the part war crimes trials play in peace-making, backed Justice Goldstone. “This conflict is an example of what happens when you have ongoing impunity,” she said. “Our experience has been that deciding to ignore atrocities and reinforce a culture of impunity has carried a high price.”

In London, Westminster magistrates’ court deferred until further notice an appeal by a group of Palestinians for the arrest of Mr Barak. It is not clear whether the court will hear the case while he is still in Britain.

According to the London-based Daily Telegraph , the British foreign ministry recommended to the court that it treat the appeal as it did when a similar appeal was issued in 2004 against Israel’s then defence minister, Shaul Mofaz, granting him immunity as a diplomat.

The appeal in Britain comes with similar actions being launched by human rights groups in the Netherlands, South Africa and Spain, all hoping to take advantage of “universal jurisdiction” laws that allow war criminals to be prosecuted irrespective of where the alleged crimes took place.

Mr Barak was due to speak at Britain’s Labour Party annual conference yesterday, at a fringe event. He was also set to meet Britain’s prime minister, Gordon Brown, and foreign secretary, David Miliband.  Sources close to Mr Barak said it was too early to know whether the British court had followed foreign ministry advice.

In June, Spain’s national court decided to shelve an investigation launched by one of its judges into a July 2002 air strike by the Israel defence forces on a Hamas target in the Gaza Strip. Britain’s law lords made history 10 years ago when they ruled that former Chilean president Augusto Pinochet could be extradited to face trial in Spain on a universal jurisdiction warrant for crimes committed in Chile, before allowing him home on health grounds.

Posner's remarks before the UNHRC:

MICHAEL POSNER (United States) said that the United States continued to take issue with the grossly disproportionate attention the Council paid to Israel. When it decided to join the Council, the United States had made clear its intention to address this lack of balance. The United States urged their fellow members to join them in rejecting this double standard. The United States disagreed sharply with many of the report's assessments and its recommendations and believed it to be deeply flawed. The United States was also guided by its commitment to the universal application of international law, but this should not be understood to imply a moral equivalence between Israel, a democratic State with the right of self-defense, and Hamas, which had responded to Israel's pull-out of Gaza by terrorizing civilians in southern Israel. The United States encouraged Israel to utilize appropriate domestic review and meaningful accountability mechanisms to investigate and follow-up on credible allegations. The Human Rights Council should demand that Hamas investigate the allegations and stop the deliberate targeting of civilians and the use of Palestinians as human shields. The Council should ask the Palestinian Authority to carry out its own investigation. The commitment to truth should also compel the Council to discuss weaknesses in the report. The United States urged members of this Council to commit with it to passing a consensus resolution that encouraged Israel to investigate and address allegations through credible domestic processes and called on the Palestinians to launch credible investigations to address allegations of Hamas abuses.