Terrorism victim to testify at UNHRC
A bereaved Israeli is expected tell the United Nations Human Rights Council it should condemn the Palestinian Authority’s policy of paying terrorists and their families, when he testifies before the body this week in Geneva.
“Members of this council, what if I were to pay 300 million dollars to have all of your fathers butchered, would you report on that?” Micah Lakin Avni will ask the council, according to a copy of the prepared statement given to the media by the Israel Project.
Avni will be speaking as part of a debate on five anti-Israel resolutions under the UNHRC’s Agenda Item 7 that will begin Monday afternoon and could go into Tuesday.
His father, Israeli-American Richard Lakin, 76, was killed in a terrorist attack on an Egged bus in the Talpiot neighborhood of Jerusalem in October 2015.
Former UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon visited Lakin, a Jerusalem educator who was known for his commitment to Israeli-Palestinian co-existence, in the hospital prior to his death.
In 2016, Avni asked the council to condemn his father’s killing. The Israel Project said that this time, Avni plans to tell the body its silence on the issue of PA payments to terrorists makes it an accomplice to murder.
In his statement, Avni described how his father was first shot in the head and then stabbed.
Those who killed his father and their families were given $4 million over the course of their lives by the PA and its President Mahmoud Abbas, the prepared statement said.
“The Palestinian Authority actually has a pay-to-slay law. Palestinians systematically pay terrorists to murder Jews,” Avni wrote.
This is the same authority that receives hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the UN, the European Union and countries like Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, Norway, Sweden and Ireland, Avni explained.
“Your failure to report or condemn these crimes makes you an accessory to the murder of my father, and to the murder of many other Jewish fathers, mothers and children who the Palestinians pay to slay,” he wrote.
“I call upon this council, and upon all UN members, to stop funding the Palestinian Authority, until the Palestinians stop the murderous practice of rewarding terrorists for killing Jews.”
The UNHRC is mandated to debate alleged Israeli human rights abuses at every session under Agenda Item 7. Israel is the only country against which there is such a standing mandate. Seven reports against Israel will also be considered in the upcoming session. No other country, including Iran and Syria, have so many resolutions or reports leveled against it.
The UNHRC is expected to condemn excessive use of force against Palestinians by Israel and to call on it to withdraw to pre-1967 borders, which would include withdrawing from the Golan Heights.
Israel will be asked to end restrictions on the passage of goods and people at its two crossings into Gaza.
The UNHRC will declare that settlements are an obstacle to peace and has called for UN member states to help the Palestinians achieve statehood.