The United Nations Human Rights Council has launched its 13
th session in Geneva. Russia's Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Yakovenko comments on its agenda:
"The agenda is wide and versatile. The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights will present his annual report. Here, I would single out three topics for debate. The first one is the impact of the global financial-economic crisis on human rights. The council will meet on March 5 to examine the structure and role of national mechanisms for control of the implementation of the convention on the rights of the disabled. This will be followed by debate on sexual abuse against children, due on March 10".
The participants will hear a report by the UN mission that has probed human rights violations in the Gaza Strip in the winter of 2008-2009 when over 1,400 people, mostly Palestinian civilians, were reportedly killed in an Israeli military operation launched in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks on Israeli cities.
According to the mission, both Israel's actions and those by Hamas militants can be qualified as war crimes and probably as crimes against humanity. In a resolution adopted last week, the UN General Assembly giving the Israeli and Palestinian authorities five months to conduct independent and trustworthy inquiries into the circumstances of the crimes.
Also discussed will be the abuse of prisoners' rights in secret jails. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has gained notoriety for running secret detention centers in a number of European countries, where uncharged terror suspects have been kept and abused for years. There is evidence that other nations also used secret prisons as part of their crackdown on terrorism. The Geneva session will hopefully shed more light on this disgraceful practice.
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