5 - 11 July 2001
Issue No.541
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 5 - 11 July 2001 Issue No.541 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
If international humanitarian law applies anywhere, it is in the occupied Palestinian territories. Why, then, is it not being respected? In Geneva, Dina Ezzat examines Israeli violations, and the efforts being made to mitigate the most pernicious effects of an intolerable occupation
A little respect
In Geneva, the humanitarian capital of the world, the diplomatic battle for Palestinian rights is waged on several fronts
Legal -- but highly political -- is the way Ambassador Fayza Abul-Naga, Egypt's permanent representative to the UN Geneva- based Organisations, describes the diplomatic efforts she and other Arab permanent representatives have been making to support legitimate Palestinian rights since the Al- Aqsa Intifada began nine months ago.
Ambassador Abul-Naga
Today, she says, they have made some progress toward securing international consensus over the fact that Israel is deliberately and consistently violating international humanitarian law.
"We now have documented records and inventories of Israeli violations of Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law and related conventions; these are documents that are issued at an international level and therefore not something that could be disputed or refuted by Israel or any other country," Abul-Naga said. "And unlike purely political condemnations, for which Israel has traditionally shown little respect, these documents could allow for some sort of collective international effort to rectify such violations."
The legal/diplomatic endeavour got underway in October with a call for a special session of the Geneva-based UN High Commission on Human Rights; this eventually produced two reports indicting Israel for its violations. Current efforts are aimed at encouraging the international community to play its role in salvaging the situation through the appropriate legal mechanisms.
Convening the conference of the high contracting parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war is one target the Arab missions in Geneva are working on. According to Abul- Naga, this is "a very important meeting," which, she argues, will tell the world that Israel, a signatory to the convention, is violating the rights of Palestinian civilians under occupation. Since its first article stipulates that states must respect and ensure respect for this convention, Abul-Naga believes that "Israel and the entire international community will be legally bound to remedy the current violations committed by Israel against the Palestinians."
Another objective of this legally-oriented diplomatic endeavour is to include explicit references to Israeli violations of Palestinian rights in a declaration emanating from a world conference against racism, scheduled to be held in Durban in late August. "Every single item that the world conference against racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance is attempting to combat is a clear characteristic of Israeli behaviour against Palestinians. We simply cannot accept that the international community bows to Israeli and US attempts to exclude any reference to the Palestinian case in the final document that should come out of this conference," Abul-Naga affirmed.
Abul-Naga is well aware of the "harsh and ferocious opposition from Israel and the US" to the Arab legal battle before the international humanitarian organisations in Geneva; still, she is not too worried about it. "Last October, upon an Egyptian initiative and a collective Arab effort, we managed to secure the convention of a special session of the High Commission on Human Rights. Israel and the US launched a heated campaign to block this endeavour," explains Abul-Naga. The session was convened nevertheless, and it issued a decisive decree that sent UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson and an international commission of inquiry to the region to inspect the violations. The decree also requested that the UN send special rapporteurs on different components of human rights to the Palestinian occupied territories.
Israeli and US attempts to undermine the implementation of this decree met with failure. The two countries also sought to convince Robinson to qualify her visit to the region as an independent endeavour, but she refused. "The pressure on Robinson was strong, but she proved to be committed to the principles of human rights and issued an objective report based on her experience in the region," Abul-Naga recalled. "It took a lot of courage and independence to issue this report, the first from the highest UN human rights authority indicting Israel for serious violations, including illegal settlement building, of Palestinian rights." The investigative committee's report also put paid to Israel's allegations; Israel and the US only managed to dissuade some of the special rapporteurs from going to the region.
Today, Abul-Naga is convinced that Israel, "supported as it is by the US, Canada, Australia and others," will not have an easy time blocking efforts to convene the conference of the high contracting parties of the Fourth Geneva Convention. Nor, she argues, will it be a simple matter for Israel to convince the international community to exclude the Palestinian issue from the Durban conference. She knows, on the other hand, that the Arabs will have to struggle to attain their objectives; "but we are on the right track, using international humanitarian law to serve our legitimate purposes."
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page