UN rights chief says Israel blackballing monitors, asks what country is hiding

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet is accusing Israel of increasingly blocking rights monitors seeking access to Palestinian territories and raising the possibility of a cover-up by Jerusalem.

Bachelet says 15 staffers from “my Office in Palestine – which has been operating in the country for 26 years – had no choice but to leave” in 2020 and have not been allowed back in since, with Israel refusing to process visa requests or to discuss the matter with her office.

UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, attends a meeting of the Human Rights Council of the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland, June 17, 2020. (Martial Trezzini/Keystone via AP)

“Israel’s treatment of our staff is part of a wider and worrying trend to block human rights access to the occupied Palestinian territory,” Bachelet says in a statement released by the OHCHR.

“This raises the question of what exactly the Israeli authorities are trying to hide.”

Israel — backed at times by the United States — has long accused the UN’s Human Rights Council of bias against it and has generally refused to cooperate with its investigators.

In 2020, Israel froze ties with Bachelet’s office in response to her decision to publish a blacklist of 112 companies that do business in West Bank settlements.