The United Nations General Assembly president expressed regret that several clauses condemning Israel did not make it into a concluding statement of the recent conference on racism in Geneva, known as the Durban Review Conference or Durban II.
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| UN rights chief slams critics of Durban II / Associated Press |
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High Commissioner Navi Pillay says there was a 'highly organized and widespread campaign of disinformation' to undermine global body's second racism meeting |
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D'escoto Brockmann, who has been accused in the past of making anti-Western and specifically anti-Israeli statements, expressed satisfaction that a concluding text had been coordinated.
But he added that it was unfortunate that the text no longer focused on the Palestinian "victims" whose plight had been the central issue of the first Durban conference.
The UNGA chief did not refer to the speech of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad,
which implicitly denied the Holocaust, claiming that "the dubious and ambiguous question" of the murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime was being used as an excuse to promote "a cruel and racist regime in Palestine."
Notably, it was such disproportionate focus on Israel
during 2001 in Durban that drew the criticism of Israel and other states at that conference. Several nations, including the United States, Canada, Australia and the Netherlands, boycotted the conference in Geneva out of fear that the same phenomenon would occur in 2009.
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