A month ago I resigned from the Council of Europe’s Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) because it refused to call for an end to Israel’s genocidal attack on Gaza. I had been the Irish member of ECRI for the previous 14 years, part of it while I was working for FLAC as its Senior Solicitor.
ECRI is the key Human Rights body of the Council of Europe with representation from every European state except Russia and Belarus. Russia had been expelled after its invasion of Ukraine. ECRI monitors the member states’ observance of the European Convention on Human Rights, and UN Human Rights conventions as well. It has also adopted its own Human Rights standards, the most recent one is on LGBTI rights and I was the chair of the working committee which drafted it.
ECRI doesn’t have the power to enforce its criticisms of member states but its monitoring visits and reports are useful to NGOs and other bodies campaigning for Human Rights. It also strongly condemned Russia when it invaded Ukraine.
At its first meeting after the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, ECRI held a special session to discuss increasing antisemitism in Europe, with speakers condemning demonstrations against the Israeli forces’ attacks on Gaza, which were already destroying hospitals and bombing schools and houses. At the meeting I condemned the Hamas attack but felt I had to say that the demonstrations were entirely justified against the Israeli attacks which were killing large numbers of innocent women and children.
No-one else spoke about this, but afterwards a number of people came up to me and said that they agreed with what I had said but they couldn’t speak out about it. They were afraid they would be accused of antisemitism and it would affect their jobs or the organisations they worked for.
Over the next year and a half, I and a few other members tried at every meeting to raise the growing slaughter of innocent people in Gaza, the destruction of entire towns and then camps the people had fled to, but the Chair each time speedily moved on to the next item on the agenda.
There was other useful work going on – including the report of an ECRI visit to Ireland which will be published shortly – but with the death toll in Gaza reaching nearly 60,000 people and with children beginning to die from starvation due to the blocking of food and medicines from entry to Gaza, this could not go on.
ECRI had no power to change the policies of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe but I thought that if it could make a statement condemning the bombing in Gaza, the blocking of food and medicine, and the shooting of people queueing for food, it might have some influence on the higher echelons of the Council of Europe, who might in turn put pressure on the states that were backing, and suppling weapons and support to Mr Netanyahu, the Israeli Prime Minister.
I drafted a quite mild statement to be put on the agenda for the ECRI meeting early in July but the Chair announced that the ECRI Bureau had rejected it because it was outside ECRI’s mandate, which was confined to member states of the Council of Europe. I argued that several of the biggest member states were deeply involved in the attacks on Gaza by supplying planes, weapons, and support, and I said that should bring them fully within ECRI’s mandate. Further, agencies in some other states, including Ireland, were involved in trying to supply food and medicine to the civilian population which should also be within ECRI’s mandate.
Some other members spoke up as well but the Chair declared the proposal was rejected and the question was closed. That was the end for me. I said I could not continue to work in ECRI and criticize governments for relatively minor, or at least not fatal, offences, and ignore what are probably the worst violations of Human Rights in my lifetime. I resigned from ECRI.
I didn’t think my resignation from ECRI was, by itself, going to have much effect but I felt that I was also speaking for other colleagues who could not resign as readily as I could. I hoped that the growing discontent might begin to have some effect on the higher levels of the Council of Europe. It was a very small step to take, compared with the doctors and nurses, UN workers, and now journalists, who daily risk their lives trying to save the lives of starving or badly wounded and homeless Palestinians.
I was sorry to have to leave ECRI. I think it could play an important role in the future, ensuring that all the European states comply with the highest Human Rights standards. But it won’t be able to do that if it fails to condemn the appalling breaches of those standards in Gaza, which have been supported and facilitated by many of the major European states.