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Contradictions and Opportunities for National Liberation in Human Rights Law and Practice

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The Wretched of the Global South

Part of the book series: International Law and the Global South ((ILGS))

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Abstract

The vital exercise of imagining “other worlds”, for oppressed peoples, is done not in peaceful contemplation, but in constant resistance.

This Chapter is the Result of Research Done for the International Relations Doctoral Program at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and the Center for Social Studies (CES), Portugal. I received the support of the Tokyo and Nippon Foundations, through the Sylff Fellowship Program, for field research at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva and the Palestinian and Saharawi Refugee Camps in Lebanon and Algeria, and a visiting research stay at the School of Law at Warwick University. I Also Express My Gratitude to the Book’s Editors for the Opportunity to Contribute and to Anonymous Reviewers for Pertinent Questions, Inspiring Comments, and Editing Suggestions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “And rights are taken, they are not requested; they are grabbed, not begged for. Even despots, if they are noblemen, like sincere and energetic language better than the timid and hesitant attempt.” My translation from Spanish.

  2. 2.

    Summarily put, imperialism is conceived as the phase of realisation of the capitalist tendency to monopolisation, when world powers rush to redivide areas rich in resources, seeking labour and new markets—often unfolding into war and (new) colonialism. These premises are discussed in Lenin’s (1964 [1917]) Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. See, for instance, with accounts of this and more angles, the volume edited by Rupert and Smith (2002).

  3. 3.

    In Volume 1 of Capital, Chapter 33: “The Modern Theory of Colonisation”, Marx (2013, 535–536) writes that in the colonies “the capitalist regime everywhere comes into collision with the resistance of the producer, who, as owner of his own conditions of labour, employs that labour to enrich himself, instead of the capitalist. […] Where the capitalist has at his back the power of the mother-country, he tries to clear out of his way by force the modes of production and appropriation based on the independent labour of the producer. The same interest, which compels the sycophant of capital, the political economist, in the mother-country, to proclaim the theoretical identity of the capitalist mode of production with its contrary, that same interest compels him in the colonies to make a clean breast of it, and to proclaim aloud the antagonism of the two modes of production. To this end, he proves how the development of the social productive power of labour, co-operation, division of labour, use of machinery on a large scale, etc., are impossible without the expropriation of the labourers, and the corresponding transformation of their means of production into capital. In the interest of the so-called national wealth, he seeks for artificial means to ensure the poverty of the people”.

  4. 4.

    On the risk of claims for decolonisation being co-opted for some sort of re-colonisation, Tuck and Yang (2012, 2) caution against turning the claim into a metaphor: “[d]ecolonization, which we assert is a distinct project from other civil and human rights-based social justice projects, is far too often subsumed into the directives of these projects, with no regard for how decolonization wants something different than those forms of justice”.

  5. 5.

    Formulations about the historical-materialist method are the best source of clarification of how Marxists see the relation between the concrete and the ideological structures of social forms and systems, including the international capitalist system, and of why consciousness of the historical contingencies of categories expressing them—instead of their supposed eternal validity—is necessary for emancipation as transformation and transcendence (Lukács 2014).

  6. 6.

    For instance, Koskenniemi (2004, 242) ponders: “The redemption of civil society against the state by new social movements is today a routine aspect of transformative debates that take up the left-Hegelian themes of which Marx was profoundly critical. The call is for political emancipation in order to rid the international world of the distorting structures of statehood against which civil society is portrayed as an authentic realm of human spontaneity. Yet there is a danger that the critiques of the state—as much a part of international law as statehood itself—collapse into an uncritical endorsement of informal social power. Something that is said to exist ‘naturally’ is celebrated because that is what it appears to be”. See also Wood (1990) on the “uses and abuses of civil society”, addressed ahead.

  7. 7.

    Lukács (2014, 3) defines tactics as “a means by which politically active groups achieve their declared aims, as a link connecting ultimate objective with reality”, in a fundamental distinction between “the immanent and the transcendent ultimate objective”—the strategy. While the former “accepts the existing legal order as a given principle” determining the scope of action, for groups with “a socio-transcendent objective that legal order is seen as pure reality, as real power, to be taken into account for, at most, reasons of expediency” (Ibid) (emphasis added).

  8. 8.

    Abi-Saab’s (2016, 1968–1969) comments, on reformism: “If you accept to sit on a bench, you have to accept its terms of reference. And if you want to improve things, it has to be done within these terms of reference”, and as long as the rules of law stand, “let us get the best out of them within the amenable margin of interpretation. If we can change them, that is all the better.”

  9. 9.

    An anti-Zionist Jew criticising Israel’s colonisation of Palestine and Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara, Serfaty was again exiled and stripped of his Moroccan nationality in 1991, but then allowed back with his nationality re-instated in 2000. Serfaty is nicknamed as the ‘Moroccan Mandela’, e.g., in Bouazzaoui Mostafa (2018) “Abraham Serfaty: Morocco's Mandela”, Al Jazeera World, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMG_ECewV5Y [20 Aug. 2021].

  10. 10.

    Guevara (2005 [1965], 212) defines the individual as “the actor in this strange and moving drama of the building of socialism, in a dual existence as a unique being and as a member of society”, in which “vestiges of the past are brought into the present in one’s consciousness, and a continual labor is necessary to eradicate them”.

  11. 11.

    In this argument, considering the state, the “crystallization of the structures of political authority”, as preceded by the development of a sense of national identity in places like Europe and succeeded or rather co-constituted by or with such a development in Asia and Africa (Rejai and Enloe 1969, 140).

  12. 12.

    In the Second International—Socialist (1889–1916) the national question was discussed at the intersection between class-struggle and internationalism and analyses of colonialism, and in the Third International—Communist (1919–1943), a more thorough debate of national liberation movements contrasted the bourgeois character of some uses of nation, reactionary nationalism, and its progressive uses (Davis 1965; Anderson 2016; Benner 2018).

  13. 13.

    Marx and Engels engage with cases as diverse as India, Ireland, Indonesia, Russia, and Poland, promoting solidarity with peoples’ struggles for national emancipation (Ibid; Davis 1968; Davis 2015). Some argue that developments in Marx and Engels’ views on colonialism are disregarded by critics such as Edward Said, who includes Marx among Eurocentric orientalists. While recognising considerable erudition and eloquence in Said’s work, Ahmad (1992, 222) contends such charges, like those of determinism and economism, as results of a misplaced emphasis on a premise that Marx ruled capitalism a necessary stage in historical progress, thus condoning colonialism as its bearer for ‘backward’ societies, and of the limited sample from which these conclusions are drawn then conveyed through a “dismissive hauteur […] combined in very curious ways with indifference to—possibly ignorance of—how the complex issues raised by Marx’s cryptic writings on India have actually been seen in the research of key Indian historians themselves”.

  14. 14.

    As Ahmad (2015, 13) puts it, regarding Fanon’s caution, nationalism is “a two-edged sword: absolutely indispensable in uniting the whole people in the fight to overthrow colonial rule and creating a national solidarity out of various religious, linguistic, regional and ethnic groups inside the national territory; but also an instrumentality that could be used for a transfer of power from the colonial masters not to the colonized people but to the newly emergent national elite, whether that elite was bourgeois or merely bureaucratic”.

  15. 15.

    For instance, Cabral (1979, 253) writes: “We are struggling to build in our countries, in Angola, Mozambique, in Guiné, in the Cape Verde Islands and in S. Tomé, a life of happiness, a life where every man will have the respect of all men, where discipline will not be imposed, where no one will be without work, where salaries will be just, where everyone will have the right to everything that man has built, has created for the happiness of men. It is for this that we are struggling. If we do not reach that point, we shall have failed in our duties, in the purpose of our struggle.” For that, “[w]e have in Africa itself examples to follow and we have likewise in Africa examples we must not follow”; and “we are for the total liberation of the African continent from the colonial yoke, since we know that colonialism is an instrument of imperialism […]; we want in the framework of our struggle to contribute in the most effective way to driving foreign domination from our continent for ever” (Ibid, 254).

  16. 16.

    In this sense, Fanon (2001, pp. 30–31) argues that Marxist analyses of the colonial problem must be adapted due to the colonial arranging of people as ‘belonging or not belonging’ to a given race or species, with material manifestations: in the colonies, “[t]he cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich” (Ibid). Among Arab Marxists, Mahdi 'Amel—Hassan Abdullah Hamdan (1936–1987)—was also concerned with adaptation, including in relation to a “colonial mode of production” to be grasped. Travelling through the rural areas to talk to agricultural workers, for ‘Amil the starting point was the (Arab and Lebanese) concrete reality “as a foundational movement”, then engagement with the Marxist thought, not the reverse (Safieddine 2021).

  17. 17.

    This view resonates in Edward Said’s (1978) and Bryan S. Turner’s (2014 [1978]) discussions of orientalism—ideological and scholastic justifications for dominating foreign lands and peoples based on racial and cultural, essentialised features of backwardness. In 1925, Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui (1964, 190) had also stated, rather condescendingly: “In its youthful vanity the Western civilization treated the oriental peoples with disdain and prepotency. The white man considered necessary, natural and legitimate his dominance over the colored man. He used the words oriental and barbarian as equivalents. He thought that only what was Western was civilized. Exploitation and colonization of the Orient was never a trade of intellectuals, but of merchants and warriors. […] But now that the West, relativist and skeptic, faces its own decadence and foresees its impending twilight, it feels the need to explore and better understand the Orient. Mobilized by a feverish new curiosity, Westerns intern themselves passionately into Asian habits, history and religions” (my translation from Spanish).

  18. 18.

    For Fanon, the “action of the native intellectual” may be ‘limited historically’, but it still “contributes greatly to upholding and justifying the action of politicians” (2001, 175). Yet, he cautions that these moves may usher a racialisation of African and Arab claims to the detriment of nationalisation (Ibid, 172). Africans and Arabs had to realise that the culture summoned is national, that each of “their geographical position and the economic ties of their region were stronger even than the past that they wished to revive” (Ibid, 174).

  19. 19.

    The Revolution is itself inspired by the revolutionary-nationalist and internationalist ideals of the Cuban independence leader José Martí, with a vision of Nuestra América (‘Our America’) as the communion between the colonised peoples of Latin America in struggle for liberation from colonial and imperialist, in solidarity in the way toward emancipation. For that he also saw education as key in the elevation of an emancipatory consciousness. See, for instance, Nassif, Ricardo. 1984. ‘Profile: José Martí, 1853–95’. In Prospects: quarterly review of education XIV, no. 2, 295–300. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000060304.page=120.

  20. 20.

    The country’s foreign minister admitted to Belgium’s part in the assassination of the Congolese liberation leader and first prime minister in 1961; see for instance Ames, Paul. 2002. “Belgium 'sorry' for killing of Lumumba.” The Independent, February 6, 2002. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/belgium-sorry-killing-lumumba-9195253.html.

  21. 21.

    Quotations from Che Guevara’s speech at the UN in 1964 are my translations from Spanish.

  22. 22.

    In Van den Berg and Nowak’s (2020) account, self-determination appears as a right in the UN Charter, but it is clarified in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1960 Declaration, the ICCPR and ICESCR, the 1970 Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations, GA Resolution, and the Declaration on the Occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the UN, GA Resolution 50/6 of 24 October 1995. Shaw (1983, 21) argues that the 1970 Declaration also demonstrates that self-determination has “through practice of a general and a specific nature, attained the status of a legal right and thus, consequently, a legal obligation with respect to the relevant parties”. Every state, it was noted, had the duty to promote realisation of the principle and refrain from forcible actions depriving people of this right (Ibid).

  23. 23.

    The idea of an ‘international community’ hegemonised by the categories and assumptions critiqued in the works cited—e.g., liberal perspectives of democracy and human rights as shared values, essentialising or crystallising these categories as eternally valid and absolute—must also be approached critically.

  24. 24.

    Still, as pointed out by my anonymous reviewer, the ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Chagos Archipelago of 2019 has been examined, e.g., in its assertion that the right to self-determination was already customary international law by 1968 when Mauritius achieved independence from the United Kingdom, whereas Chagos had been separated from it and remained under British administration, which flouted the implementation of self-determination. See, for instance, Milanovic, Marko. 2019. “ICJ Delivers Chagos Advisory Opinion, UK Loses Badly”. EJIL: Talk!, February 5, 20. Accessed October 5, 2022. https://www.ejiltalk.org/icj-delivers-chagos-advisory-opinion-uk-loses-badly/

  25. 25.

    One of the key moments of this process is seen in the concept of terra nullius legitimising conquest of “lands inhabited by people regarded as inferior and backward” (Anghie 2006, 745). The concept is for instance used in one of the questions posed to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in a request for an Advisory Opinion regarding Western Sahara, sent in by the UN at Morocco’s initiative. See International Criminal Court, Western Sahara: Overview of the Case. Accessed August 15, 2021. https://www.icj-cij.org/en/case/61.

  26. 26.

    If such mechanisms of expulsion persist, Anghie (2006, 741) argues, “despite the official end of the colonial period, then it might become necessary to rethink the standard accounts of both colonialism and decolonisation”.

  27. 27.

    A Gramscian approach to hegemony considers it a supremacy of a social group and its ideas over others, not necessarily through force, but through concessions in aspects that are not essential to the ruling class’s strategy; supremacy manifests through both domination and ‘intellectual moral leadership’ rested in ‘civil society’, which in turn is “a system of superstructural institutions that is intermediary between economy and State” (Anderson 1976, 35). For a broad account of the concept’s many uses see Anderson (2017).

  28. 28.

    Bowring (2008, 208) writes that “[i]nternational law contains within its principles and concepts the content of world-shaking movements”—i.e., the French and Russian revolutions and the post-World War II anti-colonial struggles, “a content that is capable, sometimes unpredictably, of reappearing with a terrible vengeance for injustice”.

  29. 29.

    Baxi (2008, 124–125) refers to Robert Cover’s (1983) distinction between “jurisgenerative” and “jurispathic” violence, citing as examples the juridical translation of the fight and normative campaign against racism and apartheid into the 1963 UN Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid.

  30. 30.

    For instance, women’s push for inclusion in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), and not only that of the most prominent actor, Eleanor Roosevelt, but also women from the South such as Minerva Bernardino, from the Dominican Republic, Hansa Mehta, from India, Begum Shaista Ikramullah, from Pakistan, or in the case of women’s inclusion in the 1945 UN Charter, Bertha Lutz from Brazil.

  31. 31.

    Lukács (2017, 5), citing Marx, argues that in capitalist societies, the process of abstracting concepts from their concrete conditions is common due to the “fetishistic character of economic forms, the reification of all human relations, the constant expansion and extension of the division of labour which subjects the process of production to an abstract, rational analysis, without regard to the human potentialities and abilities of the immediate producers”. This process transforms “the phenomena of society and with them the way in which they are perceived”, e.g., by isolating facts into separate, specialised ‘disciplines’, whereas by contrast, “dialectics insists on the concrete unity of the whole” (Ibid). Hence the need for humans to become conscious of themselves as social beings, “as simultaneously the subject and object of the socio-historical process”, and of reality, “the sensuous world”, as “human sensuous activity”, Marx argued in his Theses on Feuerbach (Ibid, 17). The question of praxis thus becomes clearer with the realisation that social forms have been mystified into natural relations that “appear to be fixed and can be manipulated and even comprehended, but never overthrown”, and that social reality is the product of human activity, in turn understood as “crucial for the transformation of existence” (Ibid).

  32. 32.

    Debate about civil society, and transnational, or ‘global civil society’, and about democracy and international intervention, in which that category has a prominent place, are wide-ranging and cannot be covered here. For more, see: Kaldor, Mary (2003) Global Civil Society: An Answer to War. Cambridge, UK: Polity; Baker, Gideon, David Chandler, eds. 2005. Global Civil Society: Contested Futures. New York: Routledge; Colás, Alejandro. 2002. International Civil Society: Social Movements in World Politics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

  33. 33.

    For instance, considering how state is organised by the ruling class as ‘above’ society, civil society is also part of that structure sustaining the capitalist social form, whereas state is the form that represents attempts to crystallise a certain stage of development, a determinate situation, and a set of intellectual categories; representative liberal democracy hence works to legitimise this framework through popular vote, whereas the separation of powers remains of essential importance for political and economic liberalism (Gramsci 2012, 98–99).

  34. 34.

    Notably, NGOs and human rights advocacy have been examined as channels and methods/language of interlocution —although other forms of associations also pass through the cracks—result in the professionalisation—often in an elitist, exclusive sense—and an NGOization of popular organisation—as ‘technical’, ‘procedural’ forms of organisation that often work to moderate or dilute political demands. For instance, Dianne Otto (2010, 120) writes, in international institutional settings, institutions can still ‘turn’ activists’ ideas ‘to their own purposes’ (I thank the reviewer for mentioning Otto’s work), and Emir Sader (2002, 92) cautions for the uses of NGOs as “agents for neoliberalism within civil society”, as intermediaries of donor-countries and financial institutions such as the World Bank.

  35. 35.

    Another type of practice in trials is that of disruption, or ‘rupture’, as performed by lawyer Jacques Vergès, who represented, among others, Algerian fighters in the anti-colonial struggle and Palestinian commandos involved in the hijacking of Israeli aeroplanes in the 1960 and 1970s. Vergès used trials to turn the table on courts representing the oppressive regimes by calling into question their own legitimacy, as shown in Barbet Schroeder’s documentary film L'avocat de la terreur (France, 2007). The tactic is also aimed at shaking dominant narratives at court. See for instance, Hassellind, Filip S., and Mikael Baaz. 2020. “Just another battleground: resisting courtroom historiography in the extraordinary chambers in the courts of Cambodia.” Journal of Political Power 13, no. 2: 252–267.

  36. 36.

    TRIAL International, for instance, engages in strategic litigation because “what is needed is systemic change for all victims of the same crimes”. See TRIAL International. Strategic Litigation. Accessed August 15, 2021. https://trialinternational.org/topics-post/strategic-litigation/. Like TRIAL, some also have as a (meta)goal the progressive advancement of human rights per se, such as the Global Legal Action Network (GLAN), whose stated vision is “to challenge injustice through legal action and improve the lives of the disempowered”, in GLAN. About us. Accessed June 5, 2022. https://www.glanlaw.org/about-us.

  37. 37.

    In much of the literature in International Relations and Conflict Studies, and in the diplomatic jargon used by mediators, the cases addressed here are narrated as complex conflicts for opposing territorial claims, where diplomatic negotiations have supposedly been complicated by the parties’ attachment to certain premises and other causes of regional and international geopolitical dimensions (Theofilopoulou 2006; Ojeda-García et al 2017).

  38. 38.

    In SADR’s case, it does have control over a smaller portion of Western Sahara, which it achieved through armed struggle, led from 1975 to 1991. In 2020 the Polisario Front decided to undertake efforts to reconstruct the area, as the state’s institutions have been consolidated there and, mainly, in the refugee camps in southern Algeria.

  39. 39.

    The UN had included Western Sahara in its list of non-self-governing territories in 1963, pending decolonisation. Spain instead agreed to and gave way to Morocco’s and Mauritania’s invasion and occupation (Omar 2017; Ojeda-García et al 2017).

  40. 40.

    The ICJ was asked, among other things, whether Western Sahara was terra nullius when Spain occupied it, but in an Advisory Opinion issued in 1975, it found no evidence of a Moroccan sovereignty over it before the 1880s. Still, Morocco moved to annex and settle the territory through military intervention and the transference of thousands of its civilians (Zoubir 2007; Zunes and Mundy 2010; Ojeda-García et al 2017).

  41. 41.

    Normalisation with Israel had been conditioned by the League of Arab States in a 2002 Peace Initiative on the end of Israel’s occupation of Palestinian and other Arab territories. Allies’ normalisation agreements with Israel have deemed by Palestinians as a betrayal; with Morocco’s move, the Palestinian plight was brought closer to that of Saharawis. See for instance, Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research. 2020. Public Opinion Poll No 77, September 9-12, 2020. https://www.pcpsr.org/en/node/819; and Lmrabet, Ali. 2021. “Morocco Lost One of Its ‘Sacred’ Causes with the Israel Normalization”. Jadaliyya, January 11, 2021. https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/42223.

  42. 42.

    Many have pointed out how these policies and practices constitute violations of IHL, namely the Fourth Geneva Convention’s Article 49 about the transfer of population to and from occupied territory, among others, not to mention the very character of an occupation as temporary (Dugard and Reynolds, 2013; Kontorovich, 2017; Erakat, 2019).

  43. 43.

    Adoption of the category of settler-colonialism has also been a dispute, with some opposing it in different grounds, as noted before—since pro-Israeli wide-ranging allegations that Jews have a promised right to the land, that Jewish institutions had previously bought lands being confiscated by Palestinians, that Palestinians were absent (itself a complicated category in Israeli jurisprudence) and thus abandoned their properties turned into (Israel’s) state land, and so on, until apparently neutral or even well intentioned points made to the importance of not abandoning the IHL framework for military occupation, denouncing how Israel’s 57-year-old regime on Palestine is already a permanent situation, and that this protraction has only been sustained through the systematic violation of the Palestinians’ rights.

  44. 44.

    Britain’s Commission of inquiry on the “Palestine Disturbances of August 1929” reported that “racial animosity on the part of the Arabs, consequent upon the disappointment of their political and national aspirations and fear for their economic future, was the fundamental cause of the outbreak”, and that “[t]he Arabs have come to see in the Jewish immigrant not only a menace to their livelihood but a possible overlord of the future” (United Nations Ad Hoc Committee on the Palestinian Question, 1947: para. 41).

  45. 45.

    Israel occupied what remained of Palestine in the June War of 1967, making for the longest military occupation despite the fact that that is only deemed ‘justified’ under IHL if temporary and based on military necessity, and used military regulations to confiscate Palestinian land for Jewish settlement and to contain the population in a “complex matrix of control” that include military orders inherited from the British Mandate (Halper 2015; Khalili 2010).

  46. 46.

    These include the UN Human Rights Council—the work which I have accompanied in 2017 and 2018 for my research, the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the International Labor Organization (ILO), and more. See, for instance, Al-Haq. 2017. “Al-Haq Submits to the CEDAW Committee Regarding Israel’s Sixth Periodic Report.” Al-Haq, October 25, 2017. Accessed October 5, 2022. https://www.alhaq.org/advocacy/6312.html.

  47. 47.

    For instance: Yesh Din. 2020. The Occupation of the West Bank and the Crime of Apartheid: Legal Opinion. July 7, 2020. Accessed October 5, 2022. https://www.yesh-din.org/en/the-occupation-of-the-west-bank-and-the-crime-of-apartheid-legal-opinion/; B’Tselem. 2021. A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid. January 12, 2021. https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid; Human Rights Watch. 2021. A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution. April 27, 2022. https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution; Amnesty International. 2022. Israel’s Apartheid Against the Palestinians: Cruel system of domination and crime against humanity, February 1, 2022. https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde15/5141/2022/en/.

  48. 48.

    For instance, Falk, Richard. 2014. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Richard Falk (A/HRC/25/67). United Nations General Assembly. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G14/101/98/PDF/G1410198.pdf; Albanese, Francesca. 2022. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, Francesca Albanese (A/77/356). United Nations General Assembly. https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N22/598/03/PDF/N2259803.pdf.

  49. 49.

    Some of the reports and discussions mentioned focus on the territory under Israel’s military occupation—thus neglecting the effects of Israel’s policies on over six million refugees prevented from returning and on about 20% of its own population, Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship or residence permits to live in Jerusalem, but subjected to numerous forms of systematic discrimination, most clearly demonstrated in 2018 through the adoption of a Basic Law Israel: Nation-State of the Jewish People, which expressly stated that the right to self-determination was exclusive to Jews and, among other things, that settlement (on occupied Palestinian land) is a ‘national value’. Palestinian Member of the Knesset (MK) Aida Touma-Sliman, of the Joint List coalition, writes for The Guardian that then Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will be known as “the first prime minister of Israeli apartheid” (Touma-Sliman 2018): “For Netanyahu and his government, we are existential threats to be fought or internal enemies to be purged, never equal members in a democratic society”.

Abbreviations

IHL:

International Humanitarian Law

IHRL:

International Human Rights Law

NAM:

Non-Aligned Movement

NIS:

Newly independent states

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Assis Crivelente, M. (2024). Contradictions and Opportunities for National Liberation in Human Rights Law and Practice. In: Venthan Ananthavinayagan, T., Viswanath Shenoy, A. (eds) The Wretched of the Global South. International Law and the Global South. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-9275-1_3

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