Human Rights Council/Goldstone Report – Communiqué issued by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs
Paris, 16 October 2009
France applauded the decision taken by the President of the Human Rights Council in April 2009 to restore balance to the mandate entrusted to the Fact Finding Mission headed by Mr Justice Goldstone by expanding it to include the actions of all parties to the conflict.
A draft resolution was submitted to us early this week. The European Union had asked to work on this text with its co-authors. The negotiations we had hoped for were unable to take place because of the co-authors’ refusal to take our concerns into account. We regret this deeply.
Furthermore, we consider that the draft resolution, which was put to a vote today and was very broad in scope, inopportunely combined the Fact Finding Mission’s report with issues not directly related to the Human Rights Council’s mandate, thus diverting the Council from the objective it had initially set itself.
We had asked for the vote on this draft resolution to be postponed to allow a real discussion to take place. We regret the rejection of this request. At the same time, we had initiated discussions to implement some of the report’s recommendations. The premature vote on this draft resolution prevented these efforts from bearing fruit prior to the vote.
For all these reasons, France, along with other delegations, refused to take part in the vote on the draft resolution.
Given the content of the report and its recommendations, we will continue, for our part, asking the parties to the conflict immediately to conduct independent, impartial investigations in accordance with international standards./.