Cotler addresses UN Human Rights Council in Geneva: Reveals for the first time why he did not take par tin UN mission

Professor Irwin Cotler, Opposition Critic for Human Rights in the Canadian Parliament, told the UN Human Rights Council today – and made public for the first time – that he declined the invitation of the President of the Human Rights Council to join the UN investigative mission into Beit Hanoun in Gaza because, “[I] could not accept a mandate to hear only one side of a dispute […] which denied the other side the right to a hearing […] and which denied the presumption of innocence.” Continue… 


Human rights under assault – what is to be done? A tale of three meetings.
Press Briefing by Irwin Cotler, M.P., on the occasion of the UN Council of Human Rights meeting in Geneva

 I recently attended the Prague Conference on Democracy and Security, which brought together dissidents from all over the world – an unprecedented and historic gathering – the “Davos” of dissidents; I attended the conference both in my capacity as a Member of Parliament and as the lawyer for such dissidents as Professor Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the leading democracy advocate in the Arab world, and former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky. The conference issued the Prague Charter, which has become the manifesto for the dissident movements themselves, and which I signed along with the other dissidents.

I then proceeded to the OSCE Follow-up Conference on Combating Discrimination, Intolerance, Antisemitism, and Islamophobia, where I headed the Canadian Parliamentary delegation; and participated in today’s UN Human Rights Council meeting, which considered the report on the UN Council’s investigative to Beit Hanoun in Gaza, and where I disclosed for the first time why I had declined the invitation to join the mission as headed by Archbishop Desmond Tutu Continue…