Gerald M. Steinberg: Watching Human Rights

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http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/09/opinion/edlet.php

Sixty years after the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, its values have been reduced to political and ideological slogans. In the United Nations, the reformed Human Rights Council – headed by Libya, Cuba and Iran – is a travesty. Most reports attack Israel, a convenient target, thereby diverting attention and resources from Darfur, Saudi Arabia and China. Meanwhile, the UN’s 2001 Durban Conference on Racism became a vehicle for anti-Semitism. As a result, human rights norms have lost both their universal character and moral authority.

The powerful nongovernmental organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not much better. Both organizations devote disproportionate resources to media “hot spots,” including Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arab-Israeli conflict, to attract attention and donors, but at the expense of human rights.

The references to international law in the current violence between Israel and the Hamas leadership in Gaza follow a familiar pattern. Last week, Amnesty International accused Israel of “reckless disregard for civilian life,” “unlawful attacks” and “disproportionate attacks.”

The terms are used in an arbitrary manner to express the political sympathies of the officials. Statements published by other prominent NGOs use almost the same terminology. And while the NGO reports and public relations campaigns now include some condemnations of Hamas for violating the human rights of Israelis, the core moral and legal distinction between aggressor and defender is entirely absent.

These champions of human rights have also ignored the strategy of using civilians as human shields in Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza and Lebanon.

In their moral pronouncements and press releases, the human rights NGOs and the UN groups that are charged with implementing human rights norms consistently fail to properly address the use of human shields. This failure is also an indictment of the human rights community.

Gerald M. Steinberg Ramat Gan, Israel Executive director of NGO Monitor and chairman of the Political Studies Department of Bar Ilan University. He is a former member of the Board of Directors of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East

Gerald M. Steinberg: Watching Human Rights

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AUTHOR

Gerald M. Steinberg

Prof. Gerald Steinberg is president of NGO Monitor and professor of Political Studies at Bar Ilan University, where he founded the Program on Conflict Management and Negotiation. His research interests include international relations, Middle East diplomacy and security, the politics of human rights and non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Israeli politics and arms control.

NGO Monitor was founded following the 2001 UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban South Africa, where powerful NGOs, claiming to promote human rights, hijacked the principles of morality and international law.  NGO Monitor provides information and analysis, promotes accountability, and supports discussion on the reports and activities of NGOs claiming to advance human rights and humanitarian agendas.

In 2013, Professor Steinberg accepted the prestigious Menachem Begin Prize on behalf of NGO Monitor, recognizing its “Efforts exposing the political agenda and ideological basis of humanitarian organizations that use the Discourse of human rights to discredit Israel and to undermine its position among the nations of the world.”

Steinberg is a member of Israel Council of Foreign Affairs; the Israel Higher-Education Council, Committee on Public Policy; advisory board of the Israel Law Review International, the research working group of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI), and participates in the Inter-parliamentary Coalition for Combating Antisemitism (ICCA). He also speaks at a variety of high-level government sessions and academic conferences worldwide.

Publications include “NGOs, Human Rights, and Political Warfare in the Arab-Israel Conflict" (Israel Studies); "The UN, the ICJ and the Separation Barrier: War by Other Means" (Israel Law Review); and Best Practices for Human Rights and Humanitarian NGO Fact-Finding (co-author), Nijhoff, Leiden, 2012.

His op-ed columns have been published in Wall St. Journal (Europe), Financial Times, Ha’aretz,International Herald Tribune, Jerusalem Post, and other publications. He has appeared as a commentator on the BBC, CBC, CNN, and NPR.


Read all stories by Gerald M. Steinberg