Egypt, Qatar, Israel, Algeria and Sudan voted last Wednesday to remove the status of "consultative" from the Arab Commission for Human Rights at the UN Economic and Social Council for one year.
The Israeli aggression against the Gaza Strip had caused a dispute and a media war between Egypt and Qatar over the last few days, but now these two countries stood on the same side.
Speaking to Al-Masry Al-Youm, the commission’s spokesman Haytham Manna said the funny thing is that the Arab countries have united with Israel to punish the Arab commission while the commission, in cooperation with a global coalition of 400 human rights organizations, is engaged in a battle to bring Israel and Israeli war criminals to book for their actions against Palestinian children.
Manna has explained the Arab solidarity against the Commission by saying:
"Egypt is against us because we have covered the military trials of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) leaders.
Qatar sees us as enemies due to the campaign that we launched with Al-Mora Bedouins and that enabled most of them to regain their lost nationality.
"Algeria’s representative at the UN Economic and Social Council has a personal problem with our representative at the United Nations. Moreover, we have made a report on torture in Algeria.
"As for Sudan, it fears that our pressure to prosecute Israeli leaders may affect the trial of the Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir before the International Criminal Court," he added.
Manna accused Egypt’s representative of inciting the Arab States against the commission, saying that officials quoted the Egyptian representative as saying: "We must chastise the human rights organizations that have become wild against our regimes."
The commission issued a statement yesterday saying: "Strangely enough, Algeria, Egypt, Sudan, Qatar and Israel voted on January 28 to deprive the commission of its consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council for a year."
Since its formation in 1998, the Commission has been in an unceasing conflict with states preventing it from carrying out field work, pursuing it everywhere, fighting its initiatives and warning it as if it were the Devil in the Bottle.
The commission is an enemy of corrupt Arab and world political and cultural systems, so its head is wanted for this and that, as the statement puts it.