MISSION ACCOMPLISHED

ECI collected thousands of signatures for the petition. Thank you for your participation!

The mission has now been accomplished.

Quote from ECI press release from 1 December 2012:
 
"In May, ECI met with the head of the UN Holocaust Remembrance Programme in New York to announce the launch of a petition. The campaign was put on hold a few months later in September, after UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon spoke at the annual meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran. At the meeting, hosted by Iranian leader Ahmadinejad, Ban Ki-moon stated that he ”strongly rejected any threat by any UN member state to destroy another UN member state or the use of outrageous comments to deny historical facts such as the Holocaust.”
…
 
‘The ”Ban Holocaust denial at the UN” petition illustrates how civil society and the UN can work together to achieve concrete results’, ECI Director Tomas Sandell said.
 
He explained that although ECI had initially been highly critical of Ban Ki-moon’s decision to attend the Non-Aligned meeting in Tehran, it later retracted having heard of   the statements made by the Secretary General.
 
Explaining ECI’s strategy to [Jan  Eliasson, Deputy Secretary-General of the UN,], Sandell said ‘ECI decided to wait until the opening session of the UN General Assembly in the last week of September, to hear whether the reprimands by the Secretary General had made any difference.
Although Ahmadinejad’s speech at the 67th General Assembly was highly questionable, it did not explicitly mention Holocaust denial.’
 
Eliasson was pleased to hear of  the recognition of the role of the UN Secretary General in speaking out against Holocaust denial, but added that ”we all played our parts”, hence also giving credit to ECI and the ”Ban Holocaust denial at the UN” campaign in achieving its goal."

European Coalition for Israel
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