The Special Rapporteur at the United Nations concerned with promoting and protecting the right to freedom of opinion and expression accused the United States, Canada, France, Germany and Belgium of suppressing the right to demonstrate for the Palestinian cause. She also accused Israel of launching serious attacks on the media in the Palestinian territories, denouncing its assassination of journalists.
In a report submitted to the United Nations General Assembly and the press yesterday, Friday, the Special Rapporteur, Irene Khan – an “independent” expert at the United Nations since 2020 – accused “a number of European countries of imposing measures to restrict freedom of expression, suppress protests against the massacre in Gaza, and ban pro-demonstrations.” For the Palestinians.”
Khan, a Bangladeshi human rights lawyer, spoke of “demonstrations at universities in the United States that were brutally suppressed,” referring to the intervention of riot police in New York at the end of last April to expel dozens of pro-Palestinian activists who were occupying part of Columbia University. .
As for European countries, Khan singled out “Germany, which imposed a complete ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations since October of last year, and since then has placed restrictions on such protests in various German regions,” adding that these restrictions were “never imposed on Demonstrations for Israel, but always pro-Palestinian ones.”
She continued, saying, “France tried to take the same measures, but the courts rejected them, and the evaluation began on a case-by-case basis,” noting that “Belgium and Canada adopted similar positions.”
At the beginning of the Israeli attack on Gaza a year ago, the French Ministry of the Interior called for a ban on pro-Palestinian demonstrations for fear of public unrest. But the Council of State, the highest administrative court, called on the French government to make decisions on a case-by-case basis.
Khan also criticized Israel against the backdrop of “serious attacks on the media in the occupied Palestinian territories – Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem – targeted assassinations of journalists, arbitrary arrests, dozens of cases of destruction of journalistic infrastructure and equipment in Gaza, and refusal to allow the international press to enter.”
The independent rapporteur concluded that “tightening censorship in Israel and the occupied territories indicates that the Israeli authorities have a strategy to silence critical journalism.”