Middle East
Dail Éireann — 2022-10-06
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Simon Coveney (FG), Cork South-Central

What I said to the Israeli ambassador is the same thing we have been saying internationally to Israel in multiple forums, including the UN Human Rights Council, UN Security Council and EU meetings. We expect Israel to conduct independent investigations when killings occur, whether of journalists, children or anybody else. An occupying power in an occupied territory has international obligations. One of the reasons I have been so outspoken about the approach of the Israeli Government towards NGOs their closure and the labelling of some of them as terrorist organisations, is that the important role of civil society organisations in a place such as the West Bank is essential to expose wrongdoing, to ask hard and awkward questions of governments and security forces and to take legal cases when appropriate. That civil society space is being shut down despite the fact that we are funding some of the organisations and are perfectly satisfied they are doing what they should be doing as civil society organisations.

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2022-10-06/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:51:08+00:00
Sitting date: 2022-10-06