Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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Question 19: To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs his plans to support the UN Human Rights Council resolution passed on 25 March 2011, which calls on the UN General Assembly to address the continuing impunity for war crimes and possible crimes against humanity committed in the 2008-09 Gaza conflict and the failure of both Israel and the Hamas [i]de facto[/i] administration to conduct credible, independent investigations, by calling on the UN Security Council to refer the situation to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court. [8771/11]

Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)
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I propose to take Questions Nos. 15 and 19 together.

The report of the UN Fact Finding Mission into the Gaza conflict, or the Goldstone Report, was published in September 2009 and was widely welcomed as a serious and authoritative investigation of events during that conflict, and an attempt to bring greater accountability for this conflict. The Report has again been the subject of public debate in recent weeks following the publication of an article by Judge Goldstone. In my view this article has been significantly misrepresented. It cannot reasonably be interpreted as amounting to a refutation of the report of the Fact Finding Mission. I do not believe that Judge Goldstone's comments in the article materially undermine the findings of that report. The report continues to impress as a sober, painstaking and sincere investigation of events which were complex and violent, and in relation to which it was, and remains, very difficult to achieve clarity.

In the year and a half since its publication, the Israeli military has conducted a large number of inquiries into alleged incidents. A number of these inquiries appear to suggest that some of the incidents were the result of error rather than deliberate misuse of force. However, the Goldstone Report did not find that Israel deliberately targeted civilians as a matter of policy. Accordingly, claims that this has now been overturned are wrong and misleading. Furthermore, while the Israeli investigations are welcome, they do not constitute the full and open accounting which the Report called for. In particular, they deal with wrongdoing or errors by individual soldiers, and do not address wider issues such as the direction of the campaign and terms of engagement used.

It is important to note that the Fact Finding Mission led by Judge Goldstone was also clear from the beginning about the bias inherent in the Human Rights Council's original mandate. The Mission found, moreover, that missiles fired at Israeli civilian targets by Hamas and other militants in Gaza clearly constituted a war crime. It is also no surprise that no investigations at all have been carried out by Hamas.

The Human Rights Council, taking into account what the parties have done thus far in terms of domestic investigations and accountability, followed up on these issues in its Resolution of 25 March. In discussions on this Resolution within the EU group in Geneva, Ireland (which is not a member of the HRC) argued for a generally positive view of the text, although there are elements of it which are problematic for some partners. The UN General Assembly will now consider how to take this matter forward. In 2010 Ireland voted in favour of the General Assembly Resolution on this issue. We continue to regard the Fact Finding Mission Report as a serious and unimpugned document which merits serious follow-up. Our approach to any draft resolution which is proposed at the General Assembly will however depend, as before, on the terms of the resolution and our assessment of the sincerity of those who put it forward.