Israel on Thursday accused Navi Pillay, a United Nations investigator on human rights abuses in the Palestinian territories and Israel, of bias, a few days after an NGO filed a complaint against her.
Since April 13, 2021, Pillay has headed the international commission in charge of investigating alleged human rights violations in the Palestinian territories and Israel.
In a letter dated Thursday and addressed to her, the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Meirav Eilon Shahar, considers that the commission intends to “demonize Israel”.
Shahar also assures that Pillay is “personally known for supporting anti-Israel positions” and denounces the use of the word “apartheid” to describe Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, as the NGO Amnesty International did in a recent report.
“We consider Pillay as an anti-Israel militant who should not chair this commission,” Lior Haiat, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, said on Thursday.
“We will not cooperate with this commission,” he added during a meeting with the press, estimating that Pillay’s nomination was a “shame.”
Pillay was the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights between 2008 and 2014. She was also a judge and president of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda.
In South Africa, she had been the first woman to open a law firm in her province of Natal in 1967, where she defended anti-apartheid militants, denounced torture and obtained rights for prisoners on Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was being held.
The Geneva-based NGO UN Watch filed a complaint against her and called for her resignation, alleging that she had made comments about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that “compromised her impartiality”.
According to its website, UN Watch was affiliated with the American Jewish Committee in 2001, but the NGO says it has not been affiliated since 2013 and is “fully independent.”
The UN commission of inquiry was created at the end of May 2021 following a wave of violence in Israel and the Palestinian territories.
