Craig Mokhiber, the Director of the New York office of the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) resigned on Oct. 28, charging that the UN had failed completely to stop what he called a “textbook case of genocide” in Gaza. In a four-page letter published yesterday to Volker Türk, the High Commissioner on Human Rights, Mokhiber said that “once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.” His letter has reportedly gone viral.
A human rights lawyer and 30-year employee of the UN, Mokhiber wrote that he believed that the UN once had “principles” and “authority” rooted in the body’s “integrity,” RT reported. But over the years, it has lost those and repeatedly refused to stop genocides. “In recent decades, key parts of the UN have surrendered to the power of the U.S. and to the fear of the Israel Lobby, to abandon those principles and to retreat from international law itself. We have lost a lot in this abandonment, not least our own global credibility. But the Palestinian people have sustained the biggest losses as a result of our failures,” he charged.
