HRW and the UN BDS Blacklist - The Facts
HRW has played a central role in lobbying UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet and providing information to her office for use in compiling the list.
HRW has played a central role in lobbying UN High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet and providing information to her office for use in compiling the list.
Since 2016, NGOs, including a number of groups with ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), have been actively lobbying the UN by signing multiple letters and statements calling for the database to be implemented without further delay.
The UN Human Rights Council and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights have joined the ranks of leading BDS groups by issuing a defamatory blacklist of 112 Israeli and foreign companies, falsely accusing them of committing human rights violations.
On January 28, 2020 , the Development and Cooperation department (EDA) of the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA) published a review of funding to Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.
Proponents of anti-Israel BDS campaigns are exploiting debates about mass surveillance and facial recognition software to target Microsoft and an Israeli company, AnyVision.
UHWC is identified by Fatah as a PFLP “affiliate” and in a 1993 USAID-engaged audit report (by the Democratic Institutions Support Project) as “the PFLP's health organization.” Numerous UHWC staff members, founders, board members, and senior and subordinate staff members have ties to the PFLP terror group.
According to Law professor Eugene Kontorovich, Whitson is an active supporter of groups that support Armenian settlements in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region of Azerbaijan, while pursuing rabid campaigns against Jewish communities in the West Bank. This promotion of Armenian settlement products and groups directly contradicts HRW’s assertions regarding Israel.
During a December 20, 2019 meeting with EU officials, representatives from PNGO “refused to sign an EU grant request which stipulates among its criteria that beneficiaries must refuse to transfer any EU aid given to terrorist groups or entities." On December 30, multiple Palestinian NGOs, including PNGO members, launched a “Palestinian National Campaign to Reject Conditional Funding." which justifies the use of violence and claims that the “Palestinian resistance factions are not terrorist organizations,”
NGO Monitor Legal Advisor Anne Herzberg writes a letter to OHCHR High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet regarding the BDS Blacklist.
On December 16, 2019, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) published its concluding observations from its review of the State of Israel. Unsurprisingly, the Concluding Observations parrot unverified and false claims by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active in antisemitism, BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), and other delegitimization campaigns against Israel.