Press Releases

BADIL Expert Seminar Discusses Urgent Need to Protect Palestinian Refugees

For Immediate Release

No. (E/05/04)

16 February 2004


Air raids, armed incursions into refugee camps and neighborhoods, hundreds of deaths and injuries, demolition of thousands of homes and a collapsed economy in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories of Gaza and West Bank point out again the dire lack of protection available to Palestinian refugees. 

 

The majority of Palestinians are both stateless and refugees with no international body or government to offer them protection either in the occupied territories or in countries hosting refugees.  Humanitarian aid alone cannot resolve the protection issue unless it is combined with a serious effort to find durable solutions for Palestinian refugees.  Protection will be the subject of a BADIL seminar in Cairo, 5-8 March, at the Al-Ahram Center for Strategic and Political Studies, the third in a series of Expert Forums organized by BADIL

 

The Cairo seminar will discuss the meaning and scope of protection and ways of improving regional and international protection for Palestinian refugees.  It brings together academic researchers, UN officials, legal consultants and NGO representatives to look at strategies for "Closing the Gaps: from Protection to Durable Solutions for Palestinian Refugees".

 

Public invited to evening session

 

The seminar will include an open session on 6 March featuring a discussion on Palestinian Refugees, from Assistance and Protection towards Repatriation and Durable Solutions.  The public is welcome to attend from 18:00-20:00 at the Al Ahram Center.  Presentations will include reports on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and Syria and how the popular refugee movement views recent peace plans.  The public session will be in Arabic with simultaneous English interpretation. Additional information about this public session is available with Yossery Ezbawi, Al-Ahram Center, Cairo, tel. 2-5786037.

 

Earlier BADIL seminars in Ghent and Geneva have focused on international law in peacemaking and crafting durable solutions for refugees and law and mechanisms for housing and property restitution.  Findings and papers from these Expert Forums are available on www.badil.org.

 

BADIL is a community-based Palestinian organization providing alternative information on Palestinian refugee rights.  It encourages research into all aspects of Palestinian residency and refugee rights and has organized study visits for Palestinian refugees to South Africa and Bosnia-Herzogovina to look at the process of reconciliation at work.  As well, BADIL has organized fact-finding visits to depopulated Palestinian villages and areas now populated by Jewish Israelis in Israel.

 

BADIL takes a rights-based approach to the refugee issue and focuses attention on best practice, past experience, rule of law and community participation in reaching and implementing peace plans.