BADIL Statement on the Occasion of World Refugee Day and Release of: “Rights in Principle – Rights in Practice”
“Rights in Principle – Rights in Practice, Revisiting the
Role of International Law in Crafting Durable Solutions for
Palestinian Refugees”
Terry Rempel, editor, xiv 482 pages
(English)
BADIL, December 2009
Copyright: BADIL; ISBN
978-9950-339-23-1
Order this and other BADIL publications at:
http://www.badil.org/publications
20 June 2010 – In 1947 as members of the newly-created United
Nations engaged in vigorous debate about the future of Palestine,
Arab diplomats who played an instrumental role in the development
of Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Convention
relating to the Status of Refugees reminded their colleagues that
the problem of Palestine was not a matter of ‘what to do with
Palestine’, but rather, ‘a lack of regard for certain principles of
international relations and human life, including the principle of
self-determination, the principle of the right to live peacefully
in one’s own home, and the principle of self-government in a
democratic way’. Given the divergence of opinion about the best way
forward in what would be the international organization’s first
attempt to resolve a major issue of international peace and
security, they suggested that the UN General Assembly obtain legal
counsel from the International Court of Justice. A majority of
members nevertheless rejected the efficacy of this
approach.1
63 years later and on this year's World Refugee Day, Palestinian
refugees and internally displaced persons still constitute the
world's largest and longest-standing case of forced displacement,
and the ongoing perils of ignoring the rights and obligations
codified in international law in resolving the long-standing
conflict in the Middle East are plain for all to see. Indeed, the
unresolved conflict in Palestine/Israel has become, in the words of
the South African international law expert and former UN Special
Rapporteur for Human Rights in the 1967 OPT, a test for the rule of
law, generally, and the international system developed over decades
to ensure respect, protection and promotion of the basic rights and
fundamental freedoms codified in international law:
“For years the occupation of Palestine and apartheid in South
Africa vied for attention from the international community. In
1994, apartheid came to an end and Palestine became the only
developing country in the world under the subjugation of a
Western-affiliated regime. Herein lies its significance to the
future of human rights. There are other regimes, particularly in
the developing world, that suppress human rights, but there is no
other case of a Western-affiliated regime that denies
self-determination and human rights to a developing people and that
has done so for so long. ... If the West, which has hitherto led
the promotion of human rights throughout the world, cannot
demonstrate a real commitment to the human rights of the
Palestinian people, the international human rights movement, which
can claim to be the greatest achievement of the international
community of the past 60 years, will be endangered and placed in
jeopardy.”2
BADIL's “Rights in Principle – Rights in Practice” is a reader
structured around the BADIL Expert Forum in 2003 – 2004. The Expert
Forum brought together academics, practitioners, policy makers and
civil society actors for a series of four expert seminars in the
cities of Ghent, Geneva, Cairo and Haifa to explore a rights-based
approach to crafting durable solutions for Palestinian refugees.
The effort was supported by the Al-Ahram Center for Strategic and
Political Studies (Cairo), the NGO Network APRODEV (Europe), the
Association for the Defense of the Rights of the Internally
Displaced, the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli
Studies (Haifa), the Flemish Palestine Solidarity Committee, the
University of Ghent Department of Third World Studies, ICCO
(Netherlands), the Institute of Graduate Development Studies
(Geneva), Oxfam Solidarity (Belgium), Stichting Vluchteling
(Netherlands), the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (PD
IV) and the Swiss Human Rights Forum Israel/Palestine. Publication
of this book, which summarizes years of research and debate, was
made possible through the support of the Spanish Development
Cooperation (AECID).
The book contains a collection of papers presented to the four
expert seminars, in oder to explore:
1. The role of international law in
peacemaking and crafting durable solutions for Palestinian
refugees, including the role of prosecution, popular sovereignty
and participation (Lynn Welchman, Alejandra Vicente, Karma
Nabulsi);
2. The right to housing and property
restitution in Israel, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and South Africa
(Usama Halabi and Hussein Abu Hussein, Paul Prettitore, Monty
Roodt);
3. Strategies for (re)linking
protection and durable solutions for Palestinian refugees by
utilizing existing Arab and international (UNRWA, UNHCR) protection
mechanisms (Muhammad Khalid al-Az'ar, Harish Parvathaneni, Susan
Akram and Terry Rempel);
4. Ways forward towards
rights-based durable solutions, including examination of Zionist
Israel's approach to the Nakba, the role of transitional justice
models and public participation, and the question whether and how
the rights of Israelis conflict with the right of return of
Palestinian refugees (Eitan Bronstein, Jessica Nevo, Celia McKeon,
Michael Kagan).
The book also contains a series of photo stories from study (“go
and see”) visits to Palestinian refugee villages of origin now
located in Israel, and to Bosnia and Herzegovina, South Africa and
Cyprus. These visits, organized for Palestinian refugees by BADIL
parallel to the Expert Forum, provided opportunities for
Palestinian refugee activists from camps and communities of exile
to explore rights-based approaches in a variety of contexts.
The reader concludes with a summary of findings from the working
papers and the debates of the Expert Forum. It reviews relevant
principles, examines how they are put into practice, identifies
major gaps in putting principles into practice in the Palestinian
case, and offers some recommendations on ways forward. A complete
list of working papers and Expert Forum participants are included
as annexes.
On this year's World Refugee Day, BADIL calls for a change of
paradigm in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. We reiterate the words
of renowned legal scholar Prof. John Quigley, who noted in his
preface to the book:
“This collection demonstrates the importance of a law-based
approach to resolving the situation of the Arabs displaced from
Palestine in 1948. The collection is the more important in light of
the paucity of serious analysis of this issue from the standpoint
of relevant international law principles. In any peace process, the
legitimate expectations of the parties and other stakeholders
should be at the forefront of consideration. If such expectations
are ignored, a resulting peace may turn out to be ephemeral,
because it may not be accepted by those whose rights have not been
respected.”
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Endnotes
1. See, for example, Iraq (UN Doc.
A/AC.14/21), Syria (UN Doc. A/AC.14/25), Egypt (UN Doc. A/AC.
14/14).
2. UN Doc. A/HRC/4/17 (2007),
para. 63.