UN "expert" biased

From The Australian, March 25, 2009:

THE US yesterday said UN expert Richard Falk was "biased" in calling for an investigation of Israel's January offensive in the Gaza Strip on the grounds it could be construed as a war crime.

"We've expressed our concern many times about the special rapporteur's views on dealing with that question," State Department spokesman Robert Wood said. "We've found the rapporteur's views to be anything but fair. We find them to be biased. We've made that very clear."

In a report presented yesterday at the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Council, Mr Falk, the UN expert on the Palestinian territories, called for a probe to assess if the Israeli forces could differentiate between civilian and military targets in Gaza. "If it is not possible to do so, then launching the attacks is inherently unlawful, and would seem to constitute a war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law," Mr Falk said in the report....

Israel government spokesman Mark Regev last night slammed the report as "one-sided''. "Unfortunately, this is a further example of the very one-sided, unbalanced and unfair attitude of the Human Rights Council,'' Mr Regev said. "This sort of report does the service of human rights no good whatsoever. It's a politicisation of human rights.''

...The UN also cited alleged abuses by Hamas, the Islamist movement that rules Gaza. Ms Coomaraswamy said the group had been unwilling to investigate the charges made.

She said the abuses were "just a few examples of the hundreds of incidents that have been documented and verified" by the nine UN officials allowed into the territory after the war ended in late January. "Violations were reported on a daily basis, too numerous to list," she said.