“We reject this plan outright, and we call on leaders and governments around the world to do the same,” he told the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva on Monday as it opened its 43rd session.“It contains hundreds of violations of international humanitarian law and international human rights law,” Maliki said. “There is [a] systematic denial of Palestinian suffering... There are violations of the inalienable rights of the Palestinian people, notably the right to self-determination and the right to a sovereign state with Jerusalem as its capital,” he said.“It is a plan to have the Palestinian people capitulate, and these two parties [Israel and the US] do not know the Palestinian people. They have roots in this land for thousands of years,” Maliki said.“Jerusalem has to be the capital of a Palestinian state and there will be no solution to this problem without the right of return for Palestinian refugees,” he said.He charged that under the plan, the US was helping Israel annex Palestinian territory and that it promoted apartheid.Maliki thanked the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights (OHCHR) for publishing a database of companies doing business with Israeli entities over the pre-1967 lines.Israel cut its ties with the OHCHR in response to the report, which it calls a blacklist. No such list has been compiled of companies doing business with countries suspected of human rights abuses.The US withdrew from the council in 2018 to protest its anti-Israeli bias.Danish Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod spoke on Monday against the UNHRC’s biased treatment of Israel, particularly its practice of holding a mandatory debate on alleged Israeli human rights abuses at every session, known as Agenda Item 7.All other alleged human rights abuses by any of the UN’s member states are debated under Agenda Item 4. Israel is the only country that has a permanent agenda item of its own.Kofod said Israeli actions should also be debated under Agenda Item 4. “Singling out one country with its own Agenda Item 7 is unbalanced and does not lend legitimacy to the working of the council,” Kofod said.Ireland’s Foreign Minister Simon Coveney spoke out against the pending Israeli annexation of West Bank settlements at the UNHRC’s opening session.“Annexation is clearly prohibited under international law and can not and should not be accepted,” he said.Coveney said he supports a two-state resolution to the conflict, but that “obstacles to this grow” including settlement construction and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.Ali Bagheri Kani, the judiciary’s deputy of international affairs and the secretary for Iran’s High Council for Human Rights vowed that his country opposes the production and use of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons.
He spent the bulk of his speech attacking the United States for imposing sanctions against his country to prevent the Iranian production of nuclear weapons.Bagheri Kani alleged that the US was also punishing his country for its support of the Palestinians.He warned that the “new measures against the Palestinian nation, called the “Deal of the Century,” may result in grave violation of human rights and could cause the Palestinian nation to disappear.”Lithuanian Foreign Minister Linas Linkevicius recalled that the world had just commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. “The horror of the monstrosity of the Holocaust must never be forgotten,” he said.“As we repeat the lofty pledge ‘Never Again,’ global trends remain a cause of concern. The fundamental human rights and freedoms continue to be under attack,” he said.