Hold judicial review of Golstone Report

Anne Bayefsky reports New UN committee members and UN staffer have anti-Israel connections.

Among the multitude of attacks on Israel that the United Nations has sponsored over the decades, last year’s Goldstone report on the 2009 Gaza war stands out for its dangerous distortions of fact and law. Now the UN Human Rights Council has sponsored a second-team of investigators to press forward with the report’s implementation. Just as with round one, the United Nations has guaranteed the result of round two by selecting individuals whose independence is compromised from the start.

She goes on in great details to set out how the new process is as bad as the original one.

She ends with,

The only way to respond is to challenge the legal bona fides of the report and its progeny and expose the venality of the political agenda inseparable from them. The case must begin by refusing to lend any credence to this latest mutation of the UN virus.

What she is asking for is know in legal parlance as a “judicial review”.

Most democracies embrace such a process as a means to determine whether justice was done or whether the determination by lower courts or bodies falls short of judicial norms.

They look into the entire process including the mandate, the impartiality of judges, the procedural aspects, the vetting of facts through cross examination and otherwise, and the decision making process. If in the minds of the judges conducting the judicial review, anything falls short of judicial norms, they set the decision aside.

I have long been of he opinion and argued that Israel should set up a panel of international judges to hold such a review. I have no doubt they would deliver a scathing report thereby delegitimating the report.