NGO Conference Calls for Regional Human Rights Reform

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NGO Conference Calls for Regional Human Rights Reform

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights on 25 February 2013, following the conclusion of a NGO seminar on human rights issues throughout the Middle East.]

An NGO high level strategic conference urges the Arab League to adopt an effective human rights protection system as an urgent requirement to meet expectations of the peoples and address major violations of and threats to universal human rights in the Arab region.

In a meeting with LAS Secretary General Nabeel Al Araby, conference convenors urged him to push for the promotion and the upgrading of all LAS standards, organs, and procedures in compliance with international human rights standards. Al Araby, who supported the Conference, welcomed human rights NGOs` strong input, mobilisation, and convergence for universal human rights standards in the region.

From 16 to 18 February 2013, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), in cooperation with the Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR), the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies (CIHRS), and the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights (EIPR), held a regional conference in Cairo entitled “The League of Arab States (LAS), human rights, and civil society: challenges ahead” to which top representatives of the LAS participated, together with around fifty representatives of national, regional, and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The presence of human rights experts from the African Union, Organisation of American States , Council of Europe, and United Nations systems allowed for a comparative legal and practical analysis with the LAS.

During three days in this unprecedented format, participants discussed the challenges faced by the LAS to enhance the protection and promotion of human rights in the region. They urged the LAS to reform and strengthen the organs in charge of human rights issues and demanded effective interaction with independent civil society organizations at all levels of the LAS.

Meeting with a delegation led by Souhayr Belhassen, FIDH President, and composed of the heads of the conference convenors, Bahey Eddin Hassan, Hossam Bahgat, and Raji Sourani, the Secretary General of the LAS, Mr. Nabeel El Araby rereaffirmed the commitment of the LAS to listen to all ideas and suggestions on effective interaction with civil society to strengthen human rights in the Arab region. Fully aware of the demands of social justice and fundamental freedoms that the Arab revolutions have forced on the Arab States, the Secretary General reaffirmed the necessity to upgrade the LAS mechanisms to be able to achieve such demands.

The Secretary General of the Arab League also reaffirmed his prioritization of the establishment of an Arab court of human rights, a proposal made by the Kingdom of Bahrain. Organizations intend to oppose the establishment of the Court unless its set-up and rules comply with international standards, which would require a reform of the Arab Charter on Human Rights, seen as a priority by our organizations.

Beginning of 2012, the Secretary General asked Mr. Lakhdar Brahimi to consider a reform of the organic structure of the LAS and to make recommendations on the enhancement of the interaction between the LAS and NGOs. Brahimi, who also participated in the conference, submitted his report beginning of January 2013. Both the Secretary General and Mr. Brahimi made it clear during the conference that civil society would not be consulted on the report before it is discussed and possibly approved by the LAS member-states during the next Arab Summit to be held in Doha, in March 2013.

Our organizations believe that the LAS cannot take on a new role in democratic transition, consult with civil society, and support its claims in that regard without operating an effective change in the modality of its relationship with independent civil society organizations. It should also set forth mechanisms and unambiguous criteria based on transparency in order to ensure a permanent relationship between civil society organizations and all the LAS bodies.

Regretting that Arab Civil society organizations still face severe domestic repression and restrictions to their effective participation within the the LAS political organs and affirming that the Arab Charter on Human Rights in its current form is inconsistent with international human rights standards and lacks effective guarantees to ensure the aspiration of Arab people to an effective human rights system, the participants to the seminar have agreed on a set of recommendations (attached below), to be sent to the Secretary General and the Member-States of the LAS, that focus on three main items: the promotion of an effective regional system of human rights protection; the strengthening of the Arab Human Rights Committee; and an effective interaction with independent national, regional, and international civil society organisations.

The participants also affirmed their commitment to engage in a collective manner towards strengthening and developing an effective regional human rights mechanism of protection in the Arab Region.

[Click here to download the conference`s final declaration.] 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412