B’nai B’rith President Robert Spitzer and CEO Daniel S. Mariaschin have issued the following statement:

B’nai B’rith International condemns the passage by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) of four anti-Israel resolutions at the council’s main session of the year.

The council removed language from one resolution that would have created a permanent investigative mechanism to target Israeli citizens, including officials and soldiers, instead calling on the U.N. General Assembly to create it (even though the UNGA had already decided earlier not to do so). That resolution was still predictably dangerous, though—once again calling for an arms embargo that would endanger the State of Israel. Belgium, Spain and Switzerland’s decision to join the majority to vote in favor of that resolution was indefensible.

The UNHRC already has one bloated, wasteful, forever-mandated investigative mechanism trained on Israel: the Navi Pillay-led “Commission of Inquiry” (COI). Another resolution that was passed called on Pillay’s COI to prepare a report that would publicly identify settlers and members of settler groups likely to be used for legal harassment and sanctions in the future.

We thank the countries that chose not to support these biased resolutions. We particularly commend the Czech Republic and North Macedonia, which were the only countries to vote against all four anti-Israel measures at the council.

B’nai B’rith also deplores the actions by the UNHRC during this session to quietly—and non-transparently—reappoint Francesca Albanese as a special rapporteur, despite member states objecting to her anti-Semitic rhetoric. Amongst other outrages, Albanese has said the Oct. 7 massacre was not anti-Semitic, the systemic rape used by Hamas was “disinformation,” and posted that the United States is “subjugated by the Jewish lobby.” Her mandate—which is the only special rapporteur with a forever mandate and is only geared toward investigating supposed Israeli violations, but not those by Hamas or the Palestinian Authority—must finally be abolished.