All examples of where Michael Fakhri, the UN Human Rights Council’s “right to food” monitor should be taking a keen interest. Yet Fakhri has never issued a press release on any of these. Instead, his attention has recently turned to attacking Israel as an “apartheid state” and calling for it to be boycotted.
The Canadian-Lebanese law professor was appointed by the UN in 2020 as special rapporteur on the right to food. He teaches human rights and food law at the University of Oregon, theoretically bringing relevant expertise.
However, the UN position, initiated two decades ago by Cuba, was politicized from the start, with Havana using its influence to appoint “independent experts” with an anti-Western, anti-US and anti-Israel agenda.
In 2019, Fakhri described Canada as a “settler colony” which he accused of committing a “race-based genocide against indigenous peoples” that is “ongoing.” That Fakhri occupies a UN post supported by anti-Western dictatorships is unsurprising.
Fakhri’s advocacy, however, doesn’t extend to indigenous people when they happen to be Jewish Israelis. Following the recent Israel-Gaza conflict, Fakhri signed an academics’ petition affirming “the Palestinian struggle as an indigenous liberation movement confronting a settler colonial state.” Israeli policies, Fakhri believes, “constitute apartheid,” and are “bolstered by a brute force” that “enshrines territorial theft” and “the racial supremacy of Jewish-Zionist nationals.” Fakhri and his co-signatories commit to “pressuring our academic institutions and organizations to respect the Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel.”
While supporting a boycott of democratic Israel, Fakhri, however, opposes economic and political sanctions when used to hold brutal tyrannies to account, which Fakhri characterized as “unilateral coercive measures” in an August 2020 statement that he issued together with four of his UN colleagues. They called for lifting sanctions on “countries like Cuba, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen,” even though the relevant sanctions mainly target individuals and organs of state that are directly responsible for abusing their citizens.
During the May 2021 war between Hamas and Israel, Fakhri used his position to co-sign another biased UN statement that condemned Israel for “discrimination and segregation,” and for its “vast asymmetry of power.”
Fakhri also signed a letter calling on the International Criminal Court to investigate the Sheikh Jarrah situation, accusing Israel of “crimes against humanity” and “apartheid.”
The UN’s code of conduct calls on mandate-holders to “ensure that their personal political opinions are without prejudice to the execution of their mission.” It also calls for impartiality. Yet Fakhri’s open support for BDS, a movement that promotes the end of Israel as a Jewish state, demonstrates the opposite.
The code of conduct calls for “upholding the highest standards of integrity.” It is unlikely that this includes advocating breaking the law in a democratic state, yet Fakhri has done exactly that.
On his Twitter account, this UN official expressed open support for a criminal “direct action” in the UK in May 2021, when anti-Israel protesters occupied the roof of a factory in Leicestershire that is a subsidiary of Elbit, an Israeli defense electronics company. The protesters chained the gates shut, scaled the roof, and sprayed red paint on one of the building’s walls, while refusing to vacate the site. After six days, police made arrests for conspiracy to commit criminal damage, aggravated trespass and violent disorder. None of which a UN human rights official should be supporting if he has integrity.
When the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the right to food spends his time promoting the boycott campaign against Israel while ignoring human rights abuser states that let their people starve, doesn’t it give you food for thought as to why Michael Fakhri holds such a position?
Simon Plosker is the managing editor of United Nations Watch, a human rights organization based in Geneva, Switzerland.