Dutch minister won’t greet UN’s Gaza rapporteur: Telegraaf
Foreign affairs minister Caspar Veldkamp has said he will not receive the UN’s special rapporteur on Gaza during her visit to the Dutch parliament, citing her “unseemly” comments and social media messages, the Telegraaf reported on Tuesday.
Francesca Albanese is visiting parliament on Thursday morning to speak to members of the foreign affairs committee and brief MPs on the current situation in Gaza. She was invited by Labour MP Kati Piri.
The primary purpose of her trip to the Netherlands is to visit Utrecht and Leiden universities and give a sold-out lecture at the invitation of The Rights Forum, which campaigns for the rights of Palestinians.
The invitation was approved by a majority of members of the foreign affairs committee, but the meeting during which the vote took place was not attended by the far right BBB and PVV. However they, with the addition of fundamentalist Protestant party SGP are now trying to have the visit officially cancelled.
VVD MP Eric van der Burg has also said he “does not need this conversation” while the NSC says it will attend the discussion with reluctance. “There has to be a very good reason to refuse or cancel a conversation with a UN special rapporteur,” NSC parliamentarian Isa Kahraman told the paper.
The Rights Forum said in a reaction that the “Israel lobby is conducting a smear campaign against Albanese” while Piri slammed the three parties for failing to react to US president’s call for Gaza to be “ethnically cleansed”.
“This initiative by the SCP, BBB and PVV illustrates right-wing cancel culture, particularly if we are talking about Israel,” she said.
Albanese, an Italian lawyer, has been the UN’s special representative for Gaza and the Occupied Territories since 2022. In a report on to the UN in 2024, she described the situation in Gaza as genocide and described Israel’s claim to self defence as a “false narrative”.
Special rapporteurs are independent experts named by the UN human rights council to monitor specific human rights situations.
Dutch News has contacted the foreign affairs ministry to confirm the minister’s comments.
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