Britain strikes back at UN council’s anti-Israel agenda

WHEN THE United States stormed out of the UN Human Rights Council over its treatment of Israel last summer, Britain’s then chief diplomat Boris Johnson vowed to stay put.

Washington’s view in June 2018 was that it was plainly unjust for Israel to be only country whose alleged human rights abuses are discussed at every regular meeting without fail.

“The world’s most inhumane regimes continue to escape scrutiny,” one American official said as her country ended its HRC membership 18 months early.

But the United Kingdom — which became a member at the same time at the US — said it would not be staging a walkout of its own.

Mr Johnson said the HRC had many failings and Israel’s permanent place on the agenda was one of them. A “disproportionate and damaging to the cause of peace”, he called it.

But, he went on, the world needed a forum where countries could talk to each other about human rights abuses.Thus the HRC was the “best tool available...to address impunity in an imperfect world and to advance many of our international goals.”

He resigned as foreign secretary barely three weeks later — over Brexit, of course, not diplomatic policy — and handed the baton to Jeremy Hunt, whose column in this week’s JC announces a change in policy.

From now on, Britain will oppose anything tabled at the HRC under agenda Item 7 — but, notably, not every resolution that criticises Israel.

That could lead to tricky questions if there is ever a repeat of May 2018, during the spike in violence on the Gaza border that left dozens of Palestinians dead. The HRC called a “special session”, not a regular meeting that included the notorious item 7, and members voted to condemn Israel for “disproportionate and indiscriminate use of force” . Britain abstained from voting in that case and the Foreign Secretary has said nothing to suggest it would not do so again.

His announcement today will win him many plaudits from Jewish and pro-Israeli groups around the world.

But it is also a tacit admission that Britain’s strategy to reform the HRC through diplomacy has failed. A vote against Item 7 will not achieve the objective of removing it altogether.