The European countries that have announced their non-participation are Italy,  and Croatia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, France, Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands. Belgium said that they won’t send a ministerial delegation to the event.

Thirty-one countries have decided to boycott Wednesday’s meeting in New York marking the 20th anniversary of the Durban World Conference on Racism, dubbed Durban IV, because of its anti-Semitic platform used to attack Israel.

Several European countries as well as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Israel had already announced their boycott of this meeting organized on the sidelines of the annual United Nations General Assembly.

The European countries that have announced their non-participation are Italy,  Croatia, Austria, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Romania, France, Germany, Cyprus, Hungary and the Netherlands. Belgium said that they won’t send a ministerial delegation to the event.

The 2001 Durban Declaration singled out Israel as racist. At the parallel NGO forum, activists disseminated copies of the antisemitic conspiracy theory The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, flyers saying Hitler was right and other materials featuring Jew-hatred.

This year, “we have doubled the number of countries that will boycott Durban,” Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Gilad Erdan wrote on Twitter.

“31 countries will boycott the shameful event of this anti-Semitic conference, more than double the number of countries that have boycotted it in the past,” he said.

“I made the decision (to boycott the conference) because of historical concerns about anti-Semitism and the misuse of the platform for attacks on Israel,” Czech Foreign Minister Jakub Kulhánek has said.