Press Releases

The BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights announces the release of EU-Israel Trade: Promoting International Law Violations; a report focusing on the current EU-Israel trade practices, specifically looking into trading with Israeli colonies. EU-Israel Trade: Promoting International Law Violations provides context and legal analysis to this economic relationship; and concludes that EU’s trade with Israeli colonies is illegal based on the duty of non-recognition, corporate complicity rules and also the EU’s own internal legislation.

Besides analyzing the illegality of trading with Israeli colonies, the report also explores the lawfulness of EU trade with Israel proper, taking into consideration the active role of Israel in facilitating the lack of compliance with basic laws of international law, and also in supporting and expanding the colonial enterprise.

The issue of trade is of significant relevance for European countries considering the EU has become the main trading partner of Israel, and as such, a source of economic and financial gains for both Israeli companies and the state of Israel itself. In light of the ongoing and systematic violations of international law carried out by Israel, it is of the utmost importance to determine the legality of this trading relationship.

This is the third paper produced by BADIL Resource Center on the issue of corporate complicity in the oPt, following Corporate Complicity in Violations of International Law in Palestine (2014) and Pursuing Accountability for Corporate Complicity in Population Transfer in Palestine (2015). However, this paper differs from the others in that instead of focusing on specific companies, it addresses the trading relationship between the EU and Israeli colonies in the oPt as a whole, therefore, aiming to become an analytical tool applicable to the activities of all companies incorporated in the EU. As such, the goal of this paper is more far-reaching and it aims to add to previous efforts of different organizations and movements to denounce the unlawfulness of trading with Israel and calls for an end to it.