The United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed Richard A. Falk, a law professor at Princeton University who has compared Israel to the Nazis and accused Israel of planning a Holocaust against local Arabs, to the post of special investigator on Israeli actions in Judea and Samaria. The appointment is for a six-year term.

Falk replaces replaces South African John Dugard, an expert on apartheid who repeatedly compared Israeli actions in the territories with apartheid and colonialism and charged Israel with "genocidal tendencies."

The UN Human Rights Council was created in 2006 to replace the UN Commission on Human Rights, which many Western observers condemned because many members of the commission were guilty of severe human rights violations. However, the new body also contains many human rights violators, including China, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Djibouti.