Chomsky.info

Trans-Arab Research Institute audio talk, The Right of Return (April 8, 2000): "The rescinding of Resolution 194 fits in a more general pattern. At the same session of the UN the United States called for 'restricting or terminating' UN activity with regard to Israel and Palestine, and eliminating all earlier UN resolutions as 'obsolete and anachronistic.' That included all calls for Palestinian rights, all opposition to settlements in the territories. The US position was that 'it is unproductive to debate the legality of these issues.' And indeed it was unproductive, because from the US point of view the issues had been settled. The United States was now proceeding to impose a settlement that it had been committed to in almost total international isolation for over 20 years, but it was now instituted. Rescinding Resolution 194 also meant rescinding Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The 194 was passed the day after the Universal Declaration was unanimously passed, and it was essentially a spelling out of Article 13--actually of one half of Article 13. The other half of Article 13 is the best known part of the Universal Declaration: that's the part of Article 13 that says 'everyone has the right to leave his own country.' As long as the Cold War was on, every year in Boston and other places there would be passionate denunciations of the Soviet Union for refusing to let our people go, and their violation of Article 13 of the Universal Declaration lead by distinguished Harvard law professors, and so on, and so forth. I never once in all of those years ever saw a reference to the last few words of the same sentence: 'everyone has the right to leave their own country or to return to their own country.' Never once did I see those words mentioned, and it was those words that were spelled out the next day in Resolution 194. By now the first half of the Resolution is irrelevant--you don't need it as a Cold War weapon anymore--, and the second part is rescinded, so Article 13 is gone, and with it we have ended the hypocrisy." [talk begins at 20:17]

- posted by Pablo @ 7:12 AM