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UN Gaza Commission Head Presumes Israel Is Guilty

(New York Jewish Week) Daniel D. Edelman - Prof. William Schabas, chair of the UN commission investigating alleged Israeli war crimes during the recent Gaza conflict, told the BBC on July 17, before the Israeli ground offensive, that "prima facie there is evidence of disproportionality" by Israel sufficient to declare its air strikes unjustified because "there are a huge number of civilian casualties on one side and virtually no civilian casualties on the other." UN war crimes courts have a rule that: "a judge may not sit at a trial or appeal in any case in which his impartiality might reasonably be doubted on any substantial ground." Moreover, Schabas himself, in a respected work he authored on UN war crimes tribunals, wrote: "a judge should not only be subjectively free from bias, but also...there should be nothing in the surrounding circumstances that objectively gives rise to the appearance of bias." On Sept. 4, Schabas championed his commission's adjudicatory relevance in a CNN interview, stating: "the International Criminal Court is sitting in the wings," and the commission will likely "provide materials that would go to the prosecutor of the ICC and so that's a pretty big stick if we come to the conclusion that there were war crimes."
2014-09-12 00:00:00
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