Al-Haq Welcomes B Tselem s Recognition of Israeli Apartheid parisguardian.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from parisguardian.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
UN ready to support Palestinian elections, new envoy tells Security Council January 27, 2021
Al-Walaja, a Palestinian village in the West Bank. courtesy UNRWA/Marwan Baghdadi
NEW YORK Palestinian elections scheduled for later this year will be a crucial step towards unity, the new UN envoy in the region, Tor Wennesland, said on Tuesday in his first briefing to the Security Council.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree earlier this month announcing parliamentary and presidential elections will be held starting in May, marking the first vote across the Occupied Territories in 15 years.
Wennesland, special coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, has joined UN Secretary-General António Guterres in welcoming the development.
26 January 2021 (Transcript of the speech, exactly as it was delivered)
Thank you Mr President. As others have done, I’d like to thank Special Coordinator Wennesland for his briefing, and welcome him to this new role. Thank you also to the Secretary-General of the League of Arab States for joining us today, and for his briefing.
Mr President, let me start by welcoming President Abbas’s announcement of dates for legislative and Presidential elections in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the first time since 2006. We encourage the Palestinian leadership to work toward strong, inclusive, accountable and democratic institutions, based on respect for the rule of law and human rights. Free and fair elections are an important and necessary step.
January 21, 2021 at 11:36 am
When B Tselem described Israel as an apartheid state in a position paper last week, it did more than just dispel long held delusions about the Zionist state. In saying that Israel promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, the country s largest human rights group may have rescued the possibility of open and honest discussion from those who seek to stifle free speech under the cloak of combating anti-Semitism.
Such is the goal of those advocating the adoption of the controversial International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of anti-Semitism. B Tselem s groundbreaking paper and an equally compelling article a few days earlier in the