Activist and writer
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NOTABLE QUOTES
ABOUT CRAIG MOKHIBER
Mokhiber served the United Nations from 1992 to October 2023. Initially he led the Human Rights and Development Team, which was tasked with the development of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR)’s human rights-based approach (HRBA), “a conceptual framework for the process of human development that is normatively based on international human rights standards and operationally directed to promoting and protecting human rights”. Mokhiber also served as a UN specialist in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Darfur. He lived in Gaza during the 1990s while working as an advisor for the UN.
Most recently, Mokhiber was the director of the New York office of the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights. In March 2023, he wrote to High Commissioner Volker Türk to express his concerns about human rights violations on the West Bank and to inform him that he would be resigning his post later that year. On October 28, 2023, days before his retirement became effective, he again wrote to the high commissioner, accusing the UN of failing to prevent what he described as the genocide of Palestinian civilians in Gaza by Israel, which he termed “[t]he European, ethno-nationalist, settler colonial project in Palestine”. In his departure letter, Mokhiber referred to Israel’s military actions in Gaza as “textbook genocide” and criticized the UN for failing to act, drawing parallels with previous genocides in Bosnia, Rwanda, and Myanmar.