Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine, presented her Report to the Human Rights Council on 30 October 2024 and gave a briefing for the press on her Report. Her Report pointed clearly to the danger of genocide, a policy with the intent to cleanse ethnically all or part of Gaza, the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem.
As the then U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in an address to UNESCO in 1998, " Many thought, no doubt, that the horrors of the Second World War - the camps, the cruelty, the exterminations, the Holocaust - could not happen again. And yet they have, in Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Rwanda. Our time has shown us that man's capacity for evil knows no limits. Genocide - the destruction of an entire people on the basis of ethnic or national origins - is now a word of our time too, a stark and haunting reminder of why our vigilance must be eternal."
Yet for vigilance to be eternal, there must be persons who are vigilant. There must be some sort of structure, rules of procedure, possibility for investigation, and measures for the resolution of the conflicts through negotiations in good faith.
For the moment, there are neither short term measures such as the often proposed ceasefire nor negotiations on the longer term perspectives for the creation of political structures that would allow cooperative and safe welfare for all.
A very dangerous measure is the vote in the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) to ban the operations of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine (UNRWA) created by the United Nations in December 1949. UNRWA functions as a de facto municipal government in many places responsible for education, health, and other essential services.
As Francesca Albanese notes, the Israeli Jewish media and some organizations have created a "vengeful atmosphere." The provisions of the (1948) Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide provide a framework for action. (1) The Genocide Convention in its provisions concerning public incitement, sets the limits of political discourse. Therefore, the Genocide Convention is a constant reminder of the need to moderate political discourse, especially constant and repeated accusations against a religious, ethnic or social category of persons.
As the representatives of non-governmental organizations, we must take the warnings of Francesca Albanese seriously and redouble of efforts for the respect of human rights and dignity in the wider Middle East.
Note
1) See William A. Schabas. Genocide in International Law
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
René Wadlow, Association of World Citizens
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