WASHINGTON (Dispatches) – The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has withdrawn the nomination of leading law professor James Cavallaro for an international human rights post because he called the Zionist regime an “apartheid” tregime. Cavallaro is a law professor at Wesleyan University and the executive director of its Network for Human Rights.
The U.S. announced Cavallaro’s candidacy as an independent member of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), a watchdog monitoring the Americas. It praised the law professor as a “leading scholar and practitioner of international law” with deep expertise in the region. Though, the State Department said that Cavallaro’s candidacy had been pulled because of his previous comments about the Zionist regime, which was confirmed by the law professor on twitter.
“This morning, the US @StateDept informed me that it would withdraw my nomination to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (@CIDH), due to my statements denouncing apartheid in Israel/Palestine,” he wrote.
Cavallaro went on to explain that his candidacy was being withdrawn because of his view that “the conditions in Israel/Palestine meet the definition of apartheid under international human rights law.” He cited the major human rights groups Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and B’Tselem, all of which have determined that the Zionist regime does indeed impose apartheid on the people of occupied Palestine.
Details revealed in the Guardian showed that the withdrawal of Cavallaro’s nomination followed an article in the British newspaper published by a pro-Israel Jewish newspaper, the Algemeiner.
The withdrawal of Cavallaro’s nomination comes in the wake of former Head of HRW, Kenneth Roth, being denied a prestigious fellowship for criticizing the Zionist regime. Cavallaro referred to Roth’s case and described the withdrawal of his nomination as part of broader “censorship of human rights advocates who denounce apartheid in Israel.”