Earlier today we picked up a report that Hina Jilani, a Pakistani lawyer and one of four members of the UN Factfinding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, said that Judge Richard Goldstone’s reconsideration of the report does not change her support for its conclusions. Well now the AP reports that Desmond Travers, also a member of the Mission, stands by the findings:
Goldstone’s decision to reconsider the conclusions of the report came as a surprise to at least one other member of the four-person panel that authored the document.
“I probably didn’t expect to see the comments he made, to be honest,” Desmond Travers told the AP in a telephone interview,” adding he had not been consulted beforehand.
Travers, a former officer in the Irish Armed Forces and an expert on international criminal investigations, said he hadn’t seen the Israeli investigative reports that prompted Goldstone to backtrack on parts of his conclusion, though he acknowledged it might be valid to do so.
“But the tenor of the report in its entirety, in my opinion, stands,” Travers said.
And here is Cedric Sapey, a spokesperson for the Human Rights Council, also standing up for the report, from the same piece:
“UN reports are not canceled on the basis of an op-ed in a newspaper,” spokesman Cedric Sapey told The Associated Press.
“Various resolutions passed by the Geneva-based council and the UN General Assembly in New York would also have to be repealed by those bodies,” he said.
