France on Friday became the 11th country to announce that it will boycott next month’s high-level event in New York to mark the 20th anniversary of the World Conference against Racism, which has historically been linked with hate speech against Jews and Israel.
“Concerned by a history of antisemitic remarks made at the UN conference on racism, known as the Durban Conference, the President of the Republic [Emmanuel Macron] has decided that France will not participate in the follow-up conference to be held this year,” his office said.
With the announcement, France joined Israel, the US, Canada, Australia, Germany, the UK, Hungary, Austria, the Netherlands and the Czech Republic, who also said they will not participate in the event that will be held on the sidelines of the opening session of the 76th United Nations General Assembly.
These nations have boycotted such events in the past, including in 2011. Four additional countries who shunned the event in 2011 – Bulgaria, Italy, New Zealand and Poland – have yet to declare their intentions this time.
The United Nations held large anti-racism conferences in 1978 and 1983, but the seminal event often referenced is the 2001 gathering in Durban, South Africa, which has since been dubbed Durban I. Participants at that event released a document known as the Durban Declaration and Program of Action, which condemned racism and all related forms, including antisemitism.
But an initial draft of that declaration attempted to equate Zionism with racism.
The anti-Israel sentiments were compounded by some of the attending NGOs and who on the sidelines, accused Israel of genocide and questioned whether Hitler’s murder of six million Jews in the Holocaust was justified. The infamous antisemitic text, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was sold at the event.
Israel and the United States walked out of the initial conference, with Jerusalem calling on the UN’s 193 member states to boycott subsequent review sessions, such as the upcoming even in New York.