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UN says Israel not cooperating with flotilla probe
Juan Carlos Monge said the fact-finding mission is speaking to witnesses and government officials in Turkey and Jordan, but he added that the team has not been granted access to Israel. Israel’s UN mission said it was not commenting on the investigation.
A three-member fact-finding team appointed by the UN Human Rights Council arrived in Turkey over the weekend and is currently examining evidence from Israel’s attack on May 31, which killed eight Turks and one Turkish American. In a statement released on Monday, the UN said the investigators have begun questioning witnesses of the attack, after hearing other witnesses in London and Geneva. After two weeks, it will move on to Amman, Jordan.
The team -- judges from Britain and Trinidad and a Malaysian human rights campaigner -- has been refused entry to Israel, which claims pro-Palestinian activists on the boat were killed when they fought back against its commandos.
Turkey, on the other hand, has pledged full cooperation with the UN investigators. Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu, who met on Monday with the UN team’s Desmond de Silva, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, said all the information in Turkey’s hands would be shared with the three-member team with maximum transparency. Davutoğlu said Israel indirectly admits that it is guilty by opposing such investigations and added that he hoped it would revise its stance.
Davutoğlu said at the meeting that the response that Israel will get from the international community will help advance peace by proving that no country is above the law.
The UN Human Rights Council team is due to present its report to the 47-nation council on Sept. 27, according to a schedule for the body’s three-week autumn session, which starts on Sept. 13. The council, where members of the 57-country Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and its developing-country allies, as well as Russia, Cuba and China, have an inbuilt majority, set up the probe in June, despite strong Western reservations.
The council’s decision on the investigation, on a resolution tabled by Pakistan for the OIC, was made despite the announcement by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon that he was setting up an international probe. Diplomats said Ban was unhappy with the council’s move, which fit a pattern of overt and indirect challenges from the majority in the body to the authority of the UN chief and of High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay.
Israel itself is holding its own investigations behind closed doors. The May 31 incident sparked a serious deterioration in already-strained links between Israel and Turkey.
Earlier this month, current UN Human Rights Council President and Thai Ambassador Sihasak Phuanketkeow said the mission of the team -- whose members he chose -- would not overlap with Ban’s probe, but complement it.
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