….
Australia voted against a UN Human Rights Council inquiry into violence along the Gaza border because it felt the outcome “was already being prejudged”, according to senator Hume.
Sixty people were killed by Israeli gunfire when violence erupted along the border fence, marking the 70th anniversary of the Nakba — the day Palestinians fled or were removed from their homes.
“The UN Human Rights Council had already prejudged the outcome and you could tell that from its language. It didn’t include Hamas in any of the terms of reference of that inquiry. It only included Israel,” the Liberal senator told the ABC program.
“It included not just Gaza but also Jerusalem and the West Bank, which weren’t necessarily involved in this particular incident. It didn’t cite this particular incident at all. It had an unlimited time period over which it wanted to look at Israeli behaviour.
“We felt it was inappropriate the way it had been, the way it had been phrased. Australia has supported these independent inquiries in the past. It supported the use of chemical weapons in Syria, an inquiry into that. It was the fact that we felt they already had come out with an outcome.
Read the article by Sam Buckingham-Jones in The Australian.