Kurt Waldheim, Secretary General of the United Nations, in a reply to a letter from UN Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik, asserted that the circulation of a letter, dated Dec. 11, 1972, from Israeli Ambassador Yosef Tekoah, was made according to UN regulations over the years.
The letter in question was an appeal from 239 Soviet Jews charging the Soviet government with violations of the General Assembly’s Declaration of Human Rights. The appeal had originally been refused by the United Nations office in Moscow several days earlier on the grounds that such appeals could not be accepted from individuals according to UN administrative regulations.
In his letter of Jan. 3, Malik “expressed regret” at the fact that Tekoah’s letter had been circulated by the Secretariate as a document of the General Assembly.
Waldheim wrote in his letter dated yesterday but released today, that a request by a member state for the circulation of a communication as a document of the General Assembly “will be complied with if the communication relates prima facie to an item on the agenda of the session or an item which the Assembly decided to in the provisional agenda of the following session.” Tekoah’s letter, which addressed itself to the question of discrimination, was applicable in view of the discussion in the General Assembly on the issue of elimination of all forms of racial discrimination.
Meanwhile, there is no further decision about circulating another letter from Tekoah, charging anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, as a document of the General Assembly. The Jetter, sent on Jan. 15 to Waldheim, accused the Soviet government of racial and religious discrimination against Jews. Tekoah also deplored the new wave of the supervised anti-Semitic campaign in the Soviet mass media.
A UN spokesman contended yesterday that Tekoah’s latest letter has not yet been circulated as an official document of the Assembly because the Under-Secretary General of Political Affairs, who is responsible for these matters, is ill.
A 42-year-old British resident of Israel was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment by a Tel Aviv district court yesterday for providing military intelligence to Jordan. Paul John Gerald Glover, who has been living in Israel since 1967, was found guilty by a three-judge panel of maintaining contact with enemy agents and giving them material potentially harmful to the State.
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