Israel boycotted on Friday the adoption by the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) of Tel Aviv's own Universal Periodic Review (UPR), a report which examines the human rights situation in the country, a Sputnik correspondent reported.
Commenting Israel's boycott, Human Right Watch said that it deplored the country's refusal to participate in Friday’s adoption of its own UPR report and urged Israel to implement all accepted recommendations.
"Since its last UPR in 2012, Israel has further cemented a two-tiered discriminatory system that treats Palestinians separately and unequally, dispensing varying sets of inferior rights depending on where they are from. The regime of institutionalized discrimination applies to virtually every aspect of life, including the freedom to build, access to resources, security of legal status and freedom of movement," the watchdog said.
The UPR is a periodic process of analyzing the human rights records of all 193 UN member states. Israel presented its UPR in January. The final decision of the council on human rights in Israel was adopted on Friday without the country's presence.
The long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict escalated in April when Israeli forces killed over 100 Palestinians participating in mass rallies on the Gaza Strip border devoted to the 70th anniversary of the Palestinian exodus.
The UNHRC condemned the use of force against the protesters in Gaza and decided to launch an investigative mechanism in relation to the incident.
