Richard A. Falk
Richard Anderson Falk ( born 1930 ) is an American law professor and since 2008, Special Envoy of the UN Human Rights Council for the Palestinian territories.
Life
Falk is of Jewish descent. He received a Bachelor of Science in Economics from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Laws degree from Yale University. He received his doctorate in law from Harvard University. By 2001, Falk was a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton University and from 2001 to 2004 Visiting Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Between 1999 and 2000, Falk was a member of the Independent International Commission on Kosovo. In 2004 he wrote a foreword for David Ray Griffin's The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11, the conspiracy to September 11, 2001, on the subject. Since then, he regularly deals with the topic, in 2006 wrote a chapter in Griffin's 9/11 and American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out and published several conspiratorial article.
Since March 2008, Falk 's Special Envoy of the UN Human Rights Council for the Palestinian territories. 2011 Falk spoke out against military support for the Libyan opposition; he found the " degree of suppression " in Libya is not " pervasive and severe " than in other countries under authoritarian rule. Al Jazeera English regularly publishes articles by Falk on his homepage.
Criticism
In 2007, he compared the policies of the Israelis against the Palestinians with the policies of the Nazis and the Holocaust. He is now considered persona non grata in Israel and receive an entry visa. During a session of the UN Human Rights Council in June 2008, Falk was asked by the non-governmental organization UN Watch, an offshoot of the American Jewish Committee, if one could take the investigation of a man seriously that supports the 9/11-Verschwörungstheorien of David Ray Griffin, which claims that no plane had hit the Pentagon and the towers were destroyed by controlled explosions. Falk refused to answer.
In 2011, criticized the Anti-Defamation League published a blog in Falk's anti -Semitic caricature and demanded his resignation as UN Special Envoy. The incident became known internationally and Falk criticized by prominent politicians such as David Cameron and Susan Rice. In December 2012, Falk was excluded because of these and other incidents of a local branch of the human rights organization Human Rights Watch.