Jewish Community Makes United Approach on Durban II

01 April 2009

New York
01 April 2009

Ronald S. Lauder, President of the World Jewish Congress and Alan Solow, Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, today announced that "Delegations representing the World Jewish Congress and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations have been meeting together with ambassadors to the United Nations from Europe and elsewhere over the past weeks, in a concerted effort to jointly advocate a policy of non-participation in the upcoming Durban Review Conference (DRC) that is scheduled to take place in Geneva in only one month. We are grateful to all the organizations that joined this effort and we believe significant progress was made."

"We have been meeting with ambassadors of many UN missions to voice the concerns of the American and world Jewish communities regarding the troubling aspects of the preparations leading up to the DRC, "said Rabbi Marc Schneier, Chairman of World Jewish Congress-United States. "These efforts to reach out have provided the representatives of France, Germany, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland, and Norway, among others, with the opportunity to hear not only our concerns about the content and direction of the DRC preparations, but also our views about the way the UN Human Rights Council has continued to target Israel, following in the path of the discredited UN Human Rights Commission."

Harold Tanner, past Chairman of the Conference of Presidents and Chairman of the Conference’s Committee on the United Nations, said, "With the strong prospect of yet another anti-Israel UN conference occurring in Geneva, a unified approach was called for to press countries not to participate given the present language of the draft document which reaffirms the resolutions of Durban I and contains references to Israel under the heading ‘Victims of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance’. Efforts are underway to have them removed. Even if this effort were to produce an acceptable draft there must be assurances that there will not be amendments introduced during the conference itself. We are determined to do all we can to prevent a recurrence of the disastrous Durban Conference of 2001."

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