1. UN Watch revealed that Iran was quietly seeking a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, and shamed the regime for its despicable human rights record. Iran quickly pulled out of the race.
2. UN Watch broke its own media impact record this year with no less than 662 separate articles and broadcasts carrying our truth-telling message, including BBC, CNN, the Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and the New York Times.
3. Top UN official Richard Falk, an open supporter of Hamas, lashed out at UN Watch and urged the world body to shut down UN Watch: “The effort to discredit me is spearheaded by the spurious UN Watch. What I didn’t expect was that such Zionist tactics would be given credibility by U.S. diplomats and by the Secretary General of the UN, who attacked me personally. UN Watch complicated my task.”The American Studies Association boycotters of Israel recently invoked Falk's support, but, thanks to UN Watch's information, it backfired on them.
4. When Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan told a UN summit on tolerance that Zionism was “a crime against humanity,” UN Watch mobilized world leaders to condemn his bigotry. Shocked and angered by the global criticism of his speech, Erdogan walked back his remarks.
5. UN Watch released a 2002 video showing UN expert Jean Ziegler winning the Qaddafi Prize—which he vehemently denied for 11 years. Though nothing could stop the jackals from reelecting him to the UNHRC, this supporter of Hezbollah was exposed as a liar and a fraud, condemned by U.S. Ambassador Samantha Power as “unfit to serve,” and rebuked by the Swiss Parliament. The Wall Street Journaldedicated a special video broadcast to the story, featuring UN Watch's director.
6. Tomorrow on January 1, 2014, Israel will for the first time be admitted into one of the UN Human Rights Council's regional groups, that of the West. Through its unrelenting 20 years of advocacy—including private diplomacy, lobbying, public campaigning, legal pleadings and U.S. congressional testimony—UN Watch helped lay the groundwork to finally end this injustice.
7. UN Watch fought the nomination of terrorism-supporter Mona Seif for the world's top human rights prize. Although Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Human Rights First and the other NGO sponsors refused to cancel or even condemn her nomination—which they instead celebrated on a video, and on posters plastered all over Geneva—in the end Mona Seif failed to win the prize.
8. When the UN elected China, Cuba, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to the Human Rights Council, it was UN Watch who exposed the hypocrisy before the world, sparking scores of media stories. UN Watch gave leading dissidents from those regimes a global platform to denounce their oppressors. Similarly, UN Watch's annual Geneva Summit for Human Rights empowers the world's most courageous champions of human rights.
9. When a one-sided UNHRC inquiry panel told Israel to surrender the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem,UN Watch invited Nobel Peace Prize Laureate David Trimble to testify. He took the floor at the Council and said: "The United Nations and its human rights bodies should all be working with others to advance the cause of peace, not to hinder it. I regret to say that the Council displays the same selectivity that led to the abolition of the earlier Commission. I urge you to heed the criticism by successive UN secretary-generals of this council's habit of singling out only one specific country, to the exclusion of virtually everything else."
10. Just today, the Times of Israel named our famous UN interpreter report to its list of Top 10 blog posts for 2013:
