Draft:Craig Gerard Mokhiber

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Craig Gerard Mokhiber is an international human rights lawyer and activist and a former senior United Nations human rights official. A human rights activist in the 1980s, he would go on to serve for more than three decades at the United Nations, with postings in Switzerland, Palestine, Afghanistan, and UN Headquarters in New York, undertaking dozens of human rights missions to countries across Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and Latin America. In October of 2023, he left the United Nations, penning a widely read letter criticizing the UN’s human rights failures in the Middle East, warning of unfolding genocide in Gaza, and calling for a new approach to Palestine and Israel based on international law, human rights, and equality.

Early Life and Education

Craig Mokhiber was born into a working-class family in the city of Niagara Falls New York on 9 February 1960. He was one of six children born to Mitchell Fadel Mokhiber and Lorraine Theresa (Conti) Mokhiber. A member of the first graduating class of the Head Start programme established under President Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty”, he would later comment that his upbringing in the “rapidly deindustrializing, economically depressed, racially divided, environmentally degraded, and dramatically unequal” city provided his first education in the values of human rights.

Mokhiber moved to the city of Buffalo, New York in 1980, where he would subsequently graduate from Buffalo State College with a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science (1986) and from the University of Buffalo Law School with the degree of Juris Doctor (1990). Mokhiber was a human rights activist throughout the 1980s, protesting, in particular, racism and police brutality inside the US, and US government support for apartheid in South Africa, death squads in Central America, and oppression in Palestine.

At the University of Buffalo, Mokhiber was a member and Book Review Editor at the Buffalo Law Review, an editor at the law journal In the Public Interest, a member of the National Lawyers Guild, and was active in the Committee on International Human Rights, the Graduate Group on Human Rights Law and Policy, the Prison Task Force, and the school’s chapter of the Amnesty International Legal Support Network. During the first intifada in the summer of 1988, sponsored by Operation Eyewitness Israel and the Buffalo chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, Mokhiber undertook a human rights monitoring mission to the occupied Palestinian territories, documenting gross violations of human rights across Gaza, Jerusalem, and the West Bank. The following year, he served as an international legal intern at the United Nations Centre for Human Rights in Geneva, Switzerland, where he was assigned to work on human rights in apartheid South Africa, occupied Palestine, and post-Tiananmen China.

Mokhiber was admitted to the Bar of the State of New York in January of 1991, and worked as an attorney with the western New York law firm of Gellman, Kurtzman, Macri, and Grasmick^(p.43) throughout that year, with a particular focus on immigration and nationality law and the pro-bono defense of migrants. The following year, in January of 1992, he was hired by the UN human rights office in Geneva, Switzerland, beginning a thirty-two-year career at the United Nations.

United Nations Career

As a UN human rights official in the early 1990s, Mokhiber was assigned to work on supporting the dramatic transitions under way in Eastern Europe and in Africa, undertaking missions and advising on transitions in Malawi, Lesotho, and South Africa on the African continent, and Romania, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina in Eastern Europe, as well as in Cambodia and Palestine. Mokhiber also led the early development of the UN human rights office’s programmes on human rights and elections, human rights in law enforcement, and human rights in the administration of justice. He played a key role in developing methodologies for human rights assistance and technical cooperation for the human rights office.

In 1996, Mokhiber was tapped to be the UN’s first senior human rights advisor in the occupied Palestinian territories, based in Gaza. In that role, he advised the United Nations on integrating human rights into its work in the region, supported Palestinian civil society organizations and the Palestinian National Authority in their human rights efforts, monitored the evolution of the human rights situation, including ongoing Israeli violations of international humanitarian law, and negotiated the establishment of a UN human rights office in the occupied territories.

In late 1998, Mokhiber returned to the UN’s human rights headquarters in Geneva to take up new responsibilities relating to human rights in the Sudan, before being tasked with setting up a new unit focused on human rights in development, in which he led the development of the office’s human rights-based approach to development, human rights sensitive definitions of poverty, and promotion of the right to development. In that role, Mokhiber penned the organization’s “human rights-based approach to development”, eschewing technocratic approaches, growth-centered, and externally imposed solutions in favor of development approaches focused on the free, active and meaningful participation of beneficiaries, accountability of duty bearers to rights-holders, attention to equality and non-discrimination, economic and political empowerment of people, and an explicitly linkage to international norms and standards for human rights. He led the development, as well, of the human rights-sensitive definition to poverty later adopted by the United Nations, rejecting narrow definitions focused on income, in favor of one that views poverty as “a human condition characterized by sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights.”

In 1999, during a one-year special leave from the United Nations, Craig Mokhiber worked at the International Council on Human Rights Policy, a Geneva-based think tank, where he authored a global study on human rights and rule of law assistance. Traveling to South Africa, Guatemala, Bulgaria, and Cambodia to interview beneficiaries and holding consultations in Washington, Brussels, Geneva, and New York to review donor programmes, Mokhiber identified patterns in aid that disempowered local constituencies and distorted domestic development agendas. The study, critical of the technocratic and often imperious approaches of foreign donors, proposed an approach to cooperation more rooted in human rights standards and more deferential to national stakeholders.

Mokhiber returned to the United Nations in 2000 to head the newly established Rule of Law and Democracy Unit in the human rights office, leading the office’s conceptual and definitional work on the rule of law that would ultimately form the basis of the UN Secretariat’s definitions of the rule of law, justice, and transitional justice, when Mokhiber would serve as the lead drafter of the Secretary-General’s report to the Security Council on the rule of law and transitional justice in conflict and post-conflict societies. Notably, the definition of the rule of law proposed by Mokhiber included conformity with UN norms and standards for human rights as a substantive component of the rule of law, distinguishing it from more entirely procedural and normatively neutral definitions (“rule by law”) that had allowed repressive regimes with codified laws to claim respect for the principle of the rule of law.

Thereafter, in Autumn of 2001, following the 11 September attacks on the United States, Craig Mokhiber was deployed to UN Headquarters in New York, where he was charged with advocating for the inclusion of human rights safeguards in global counterterrorism efforts and for human rights protections in the wake of the US attacks on Afghanistan. During that period, he served on the UN’s first integrated mission task force, responsible for integrating human rights considerations in the UN’s mission planning for Afghanistan.

As the mission leadership deployed to Afghanistan in January of 2002, Mokhiber was appointed Senior Human Rights Advisor to UNAMA, in charge of the nascent human rights component. In that capacity, he monitored human rights violations, investigated mass graves, visited prisoners, advised on new human rights legislation, supported the convening of an Afghan national conference on human rights, and assisted in the establishment of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

In 2003, Mokhiber returned to New York as the Deputy Director of the New York Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at UN Headquarters, where he would press for the integration of human rights standards into the UN’s work in the fields of development, peace and security, humanitarian affairs, rule of law, counterterrorism, and gender.

In January of 2007, Mokhiber was appointed Chief of Staff of the UN’s High-Level Mission on the Situation of Human Rights in Darfur. In that capacity, he would head the team of human rights experts attached to the mission, undertaking missions to the region, and documenting gross violations in Darfur, Sudan. The mission concluded that “the situation is characterized by gross and systematic violations of human rights and grave breaches of international humanitarian law. War crimes and crimes against humanity continue across the region. The principal pattern is one of a violent counterinsurgency campaign waged by the Government of the Sudan in concert with Janjaweed/militia and targeting mostly civilians.”^{(para 76)} Mokhiber returned to UN Headquarters in New York, after the conclusion of the mission’s work.

In 2010, Mokhiber returned to Geneva where he would serve as Chief of the Development and Economic and Social Issues Branch at the UN human rights office. During his time in that post, he directed the sections of the UN human rights office responsible for the right to development, economic and social issues, economic inequalities, poverty, climate change, human rights in migration, the human rights of children, youth, and older persons, corporate accountability and human rights methodologies.

In 2017, Mokhiber was appointed Director of the human rights office at UN Headquarters in New York. There he directed efforts to integrate human rights into the work of the General Assembly, the Security Council, the UN development agencies, the UN global conferences, as well as UN work on gender and on the rule of law. He would serve in that role until his separation from the organization in October of 2023.

Anti-Racism Advocacy

Craig Mokhiber was a vocal anti-racism advocate throughout his career. He pressed frequently for the UN’s anti-racist Durban Agenda and Programme of Action, criticized the US and other western countries for their failure to fully confront and redress institutionalized racism, and called publicly for action on reparations for slavery rooted in the requirements of international human rights law. In the wake of the serious of high-profile police killings of unarmed black men and women in the United States, Mokhiber spoke out against what he saw as centuries of impunity for crimes against black people in the US and the broader west.

Immigrant Rights

Mokhiber was involved in advocacy for immigrant rights for decades, beginning in his work as a lawyer at the New York Bar. At the UN, Mokhiber led diplomatic efforts and public advocacy in the lead up to the UN Summit for Refugees and Migrants in 2016, and the UN Conference on Migration in 2018. Mokhiber’s position was that international human rights, as defined in international law, attach to the person and follow that person wherever s/he goes, including across national borders. As such, migrants are entitled to the full range of human rights protection to which nationals are entitled, with the limited exceptions of certain electoral rights and movement rights and that, in all cases, migrants, regardless of their migration status, are entitled to certain due process guarantees in the determination of their rights under national legal processes.

UN Political Advocacy

Mokhiber was charged with leading political advocacy on behalf of the UN human rights office for several global intergovernmental conferences and summits in the 1990s and 2000s. Having served on the secretariats of the World Conference on Human Rights in 1993, the UN Commission on Human Rights in 1995, and the UN Working Group on the Right to Development in 2001, he was later tapped to represent the human rights office in its advocacy at the World Summit in New York in 2005. That global summit adopted an outcome that included a number of historic gains for the UN’s human rights programme, including the creation of a new Human Rights Council, the doubling of the UN human rights budget, the first mandate for the mainstreaming of human rights standards into the UN’s work on development and on peace and security, and the establishment of a role for the High Commissioner for Human Rights in briefing the Security Council.

Mokhiber then represented the UN human rights office in the UN’s LDC-IV Conference in Istanbul in 2011, where he appealed for approaches to development in least-developed countries that were based not on economic growth, but rather on equity and dignity. In his statement to the Conference, he argued that “development - real development - is about freedom from fear and freedom from want, for all people, without discrimination. Any more narrow analysis, focused only on economic growth, or private investment, or governmental structures, is destined to fail.”

At the Rio 20 conference in 2012, Mokhiber argued that “there could be no such thing as sustainable development without due attention to human rights,” and advocated for the integration of a human rights-based approach in the outcome of the Conference. Later, in. the lead up to the UN Sustainable Development Summit in 2015, Mokhiber led the advocacy effort of the UN human rights office, and served on the UN Secretary-General’s preparatory team for the summit.

In a decade of advocacy before the UN working group on the human rights of older persons beginning in 2012, Mokhiber argued that older persons were growing human rights constituency in the international system that they were increasingly subjected to discrimination, abuse, neglect, and the violation of their human rights based on their status as older persons. To strengthen their protection, he advocated for development of a dedicated international convention on the human rights of older persons.

Advocacy for reform within the UN itself

Throughout his UN career, Mokhiber led initiatives designed to better integrate respect for human rights within the UN itself, including in its development, peacekeeping, and humanitarian work. He was for five years the Chairman of the UN Task Force for Action Two (an initiative to integrate human rights into the UN’s development work), Chaired the UN Democracy Fund Consultative Group, co-chaired the UN Working Group on Leadership, chaired the UN Working Group on Inequalities, headed the Steering Committee of the UN Human Rights Mainstreaming Fund, and served on the UN Gender Task Team.

Critique of UN Leadership

Mokhiber argued that the United Nations was a constitutional organization that was bound by the norms and standards of the UN Charter and by the UN’s normative treaties and declarations. UN leaders that deferred to political considerations in ways that compromised these norms and standards were in breach of their duties, in Mokhiber’s view. He wrote:

“[t]he UN is no mere conference center, no venue for the lowest common denominator, no morally neutral entity built to accommodate any state position, no matter how destructive to human dignity, or human progress. Rather, the organization is constitutionally bound by its Charter to take sides – on behalf of human rights, equality, peace, and sustainable development. Remaining true to that mandate requires leaders across the organization who are ready to defend the norms, standards, and principles of the organization – and the peoples that it serves - even, indeed especially, in the face of pressure from governments and other powerful actors.”

On that basis, as Co-Chair of the UN’s Working Group on Leadership, he led the development of a new, norm-based “leadership model” for the United Nations, with a particular focus on the UN’s norms and standards for human rights. He complained that “old, … deferential approaches … continued to stymie effective UN action in crisis situations around the world. Unhelpful pressure from host countries and powerful states sometimes had the effect of silencing principled interventions, dividing UN actors on the ground and at headquarters, marginalizing those ringing the alarm, and generally stalling more principled UN action.” To address this, he proposed “a concept of accountability that goes beyond bureaucratic accountability to organizational hierarchy, intergovernmental bodies and Member States, that is, forms of accountability most subject to political control. The new framework instead prioritizes normative accountability (to the constitutional norms of the organization, as codified in its Charter, treaties and declarations), and accountability to the people that the organization serves, especially those most marginalized or vulnerable among them.”

Later, in a speech to the Oxford Union, Mokhiber catalogued the UN’s failures in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, and Palestine, and observed that, in each of these cases “the road to hell was paved by political compromises with powerful actors that became moral compromises at the expense of the rights and dignity of the disempowered masses.” He argued that UN leader were bound by the UN Charter and its treaties and declarations to take the side of its ow norms and standards in the face of resistance from powerful UN member states, charging that “time after time, the political leadership of the UN has chosen not to speak truth to power, not to speak law to force, not to remain true to its own Charter mandate to defend peace, human rights, equality, and development, but rather to bow to power, and to sacrifice the lives and wellbeing of millions at the altar of political expediency.” While recognizing the important value of the UN’s humanitarian aid, he nevertheless warned that such efforts had often been ultimately in vain, as aid recipients were slaughtered in the face of the failed political response of the international community. Mokhiber asked “Is the argument that we should celebrate the feeding of the lamb by those who are silent at its slaughter? By now, these leaders should have learned from the mathematics of history that humanitarian generosity plus political cowardice can equal only continued impunity, failure, suffering, and death.”

Separation from the UN

In February and March of 2023, in the wake of a series of attacks against Palestinians on the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers, including a settler pogrom in the village of Hawara, Mokhiber criticized what he saw an “overly trepidatious” response by the UN in its statements and engagements. This, he said, was part of a trend that he had seen developing in recent years, whereby UN leaders, fearful of pressure from western powers and government lobbies, muted their critique of Israeli atrocities. Mokhiber spoke out publicly and on social media, condemning the recent violations. In response, a number of pro-Israel lobby and pressure groups launched a campaign against Mokhiber, criticizing him on social media, lodging a complaint against him at the United Nations, and encouraging an official demarche by Israel’s ambassador in Geneva.

Mokhiber observed that he had publicly criticized countless human rights violations by dozens of countries on all continents during his long career as a human rights official at the United Nations, but that he had never been subjected to smears and pressure campaigns except when exposing Israeli abuses. These tactics, he warned, were having a chilling effect on the duty of UN officials to speak out on Israeli violations of Palestinian rights. Mokhiber reported that, rather than coming to his defense, senior officials of the organization instructed him to be silent on Israeli violations, except for publicly repeating statements made by the Secretary-General or the High Commissioner on the subject. Confronted with this unprecedented restriction, Mokhiber reported that he communicated to the High Commissioner his concerns about the overly trepidatious approach of the UN to Israel’s escalating violations, encouraged a more principled response to pressure from lobby groups and powerful states (in the face of which he believed the UN should “raise and not lower its voice”). Unwilling to remain with the UN under such restrictions, he communicated his decision to leave the organization in the coming months.

Mokhiber reported that, in the following months, the human rights situation in the occupied territories continued to deteriorate, with attacks on Palestinian civilians in the West Bank and a continued siege on Gaza. Following attacks by armed militants on Israel on 7 October, Israel cut off all fuel, water, food, and medicines, and launched military strikes on the Gaza Strip. Mokhiber warned that, given the statements of intent by senior Israeli military and political leaders, and the acts carried out by Israeli forces in Gaza, a genocide was unfolding in Gaza, and the UN should be prepared to respond accordingly.

The Mokhiber Letter

Thereafter, on 28 October 2023, Mokhiber penned a detailed letter to the High Commissioner, as his “last official communication” as a United Nations official, setting out in detail his concerns about the worsening human rights situation in Palestine, his assessment that genocide was unfolding there, his understanding of the failures of the UN in Palestine over 75 years, and what he believed the UN should do to change course. The letter was leaked from inside the UN, and quickly became viral, as thousands shared it on social media, translated it into other languages, and covered its content in media reports.

Mokhiber opened his letter saying “I write at a moment of great anguish for the world, including for many of our colleagues. Once again, we are seeing a genocide unfolding before our eyes, and the Organization that we serve appears powerless to stop it.”

Recalling the UN’s failures to prevent genocide in Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar and elsewhere, Mokhiber warned that the organization was failing again, this time in Palestine. He continued:

“… I know well that the concept of genocide has often been subject to political abuse. But the current wholesale slaughter of the Palestinian people, rooted in an ethno-nationalist settler colonial ideology, in continuation of decades of their systematic persecution and purging, based entirely upon their status as Arabs, and coupled with explicit statements of intent by leaders in the Israeli government and military, leaves no room for doubt or debate. In Gaza, civilian homes, schools, churches, mosques, and medical institutions are wantonly attacked as thousands of civilians are massacred. In the West Bank, including occupied Jerusalem, homes are seized and reassigned based entirely on race, and violent settler pogroms are accompanied by Israeli military units. Across the land, Apartheid rules.”

Mokhiber called the situation unfolding on the ground “a textbook case of genocide,” and charged that “the United States, the United Kingdom, and much of Europe, are wholly complicit in the horrific assault. Not only are these governments refusing to meet their treaty obligations “to ensure respect” for the Geneva Conventions, but they are in fact actively arming the assault, providing economic and intelligence support, and giving political and diplomatic cover for Israel’s atrocities.”

Mokhiber criticized what he saw as decades of “distraction” away from rights and obligations under international law in favor of the amorphous political promises of the Oslo process and promises of a “two-state solution.” He observed that “the mantra of the “two-state solution” has become an open joke in the corridors of the UN, both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.” He pointed to the principled actions of civil society actors as a model for a new UN approach, noting that “the path to atonement is clear. We have much to learn from the principled stance taken in cities around the world in recent days, as masses of people stand up against the genocide, even at risk of beatings and arrest. Palestinians and their allies, human rights defenders of every stripe, Christian and Muslim organizations, and progressive Jewish voices saying “not in our name”, are all leading the way. All we have to do is to follow them.”

Commenting on the common tactic of pro-Israel organizations to smear human rights defenders as “antisemites” when they criticize Israeli atrocities, he declared that “criticism of Israel’s human rights violations is not antisemitic, any more than criticism of Saudi violations is Islamophobic, criticism of Myanmar violations is anti-Buddhist, or criticism of Indian violations is anti-Hindu. When they seek to silence us with smears, we must raise our voice, not lower it”, concluding that “this is what speaking truth to power is all about.”

The letter called for the UN to abandon the failed political paradigm of the past, and to embrace a new, “norm-based” approach to the situation in the Middle East, grounded in “human rights and equality for all, accountability for perpetrators, redress for victims, protection of the vulnerable, and empowerment for rights-holders, all under the rule of law.”

Mokhiber then set out a ten-point programme, which included:

1. Legitimate action: First, we in the UN must abandon the failed (and largely disingenuous) Oslo paradigm, its illusory two-state solution, its impotent and complicit Quartet, and its subjugation of international law to the dictates of presumed political expediency. Our positions must be unapologetically based on international human rights and international law.
2. Clarity of Vision: We must stop the pretense that this is simply a conflict over land or religion between two warring parties and admit the reality of the situation in which a disproportionately powerful state is colonizing, persecuting, and dispossessing an indigenous population on the basis of their ethnicity.
3. One State based on human rights: We must support the establishment of a single, democratic, secular state in all of historic Palestine, with equal rights for Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and, therefore, the dismantling of the deeply racist, settler-colonial project and an end to apartheid across the land.
4. Fighting Apartheid: We must redirect all UN efforts and resources to the struggle against apartheid, just as we did for South Africa in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s.
5. Return and Compensation: We must reaffirm and insist on the right to return and full compensation for all Palestinians and their families currently living in the occupied territories, in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and in the diaspora across the globe.
6. Truth and Justice: We must call for a transitional justice process, making full use of decades of accumulated UN investigations, enquiries, and reports, to document the truth, and to ensure accountability for all perpetrators, redress for all victims, and remedies for documented injustices.
7. Protection: We must press for the deployment of a well-resourced and strongly mandated UN protection force with a sustained mandate to protect civilians from the river to the sea.
8. Disarmament: We must advocate for the removal and destruction of Israel’s massive stockpiles of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, lest the conflict lead to the total destruction of the region and, possibly, beyond.
9. Mediation: We must recognize that the US and other western powers are in fact not credible mediators, but rather actual parties to the conflict who are complicit with Israel in the violation of Palestinian rights, and we must engage them as such.
10. Solidarity: We must open our doors (and the doors of the SG) wide to the legions of Palestinian, Israeli, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian human rights defenders who are standing in solidarity with the people of Palestine and their human rights and stop the unconstrained flow of Israel lobbyists to the offices of UN leaders, where they advocate for continued war, persecution, apartheid, and impunity, and smear our human rights defenders for their principled defense of Palestinian rights.”

Mokhiber concluded the letter by appealing for the UN human rights office to “boldly and proudly join the anti-apartheid movement that is growing all around the world, adding our logo to the banner of equality and human rights for the Palestinian people.” He warned that “the world is watching. We will all be accountable for where we stood at this crucial moment in history. Let us stand on the side of justice.”

Having been leaked to the media, the letter quickly went viral on social media, was widely reported in global news outlets, was translated into many languages, and was widely included in academic discussions on the UN and the situation of human rights in the Middle East.

Official Website

www.craigmokhiber.org