Racing National Security Panel

Racing National Security Panel

By : Jadaliyya Reports
On 1 October 2020, Jadaliyya Co-Editor, Noura Erakat, joined a distinguished panel of legal scholars on a panel titled, “Racing National Security,” The panel, co-sponsored by the Yale Law School National Security Group, Just Security, and the Reiss Center on Law and Security builds off the recent Just Security Series on Racial Justice curated by Professor Matiangai Sirleaf.
 

Panelists 


Matiangai Sirleaf is the Nathan Patz Professor of Law at the University of Maryland School of Law. Sirleaf writes and teaches in the areas of global public health law, public international law, international human rights law, international criminal law, post-conflict and transitional justice and criminal law. She is an editor of Just Security. Sirleaf has served as an associate and assistant professor of law respectively at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and the University of Baltimore School of Law, and as a Sharswood Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law Sirleaf clerked for Chief Justice Sandile Ngcobo of the Constitutional Court of South Africa. Sirleaf is a graduate of New York University, the University of Ghana Legon Center for International Affairs, and Yale Law School. She wrote the introduction to the Just Security symposium.

Aslı Bâli is Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law and Faculty Director of the UCLA Law Promise Institute for Human Rights. Her principal scholarly interests lie in two areas: public international law—including human rights law and the law of the international security order—and comparative constitutional law, with a focus on the Middle East. Bâli has also taught at Yale Law School. She is co-editor of Constitution Writing, Religion and Democracy and the forthcoming volume From Revolution to Devolution: Identity Conflict, Governance and Decentralization in the Middle East. Bâli currently serves as co-chair of the Advisory Board for the Middle East Division of Human Rights Watch and as chair of the Task Force on Civil and Human Rights for the Middle East Studies Association. She is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University, Yale Law School, and Princeton University. Her contribution to the symposium was titled "Defund America's Endless Wars."

Monica Bell is an Associate Professor of Law at Yale Law School and an Associate Professor of Sociology at Yale University. Her areas of research include law and sociology, law and inequality, policing and the criminal legal system, welfare and public benefits law, housing law and residential segregation, and race and the law. Her scholarship has appeared in the Yale Law Journal, American Journal of Sociology, NYU Law Review, Law & Society Review, Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review, and other journals. She has also published writing in popular outlets such as the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Washington Post, and The Appeal. Her contribution to the symposium was titled "Black Security and the Conundrum of Policing."

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Department of Africana Studies. Her research interests include humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, and critical race theory. She is an editorial committee member of the e-zine Jadaliyya. Erakat is the author of Justice for Some: Law As Politics in the Question of Palestine and a co-editor of Aborted State? The UN Initiative and New Palestinian Junctures. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the House of Representatives, as a Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as the national grassroots organizer and legal advocate at the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and Georgetown University Law Center. Her contribution to the symposium was titled "Extrajudicial Executions from the United States to Palestine."
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The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) is a unique mechanism that intends to review the behavior of states without distinction. The UN General Assembly established it in 2006 as part of the functions of the Human Rights Council. It is a state-driven process to comprehensively assess a state`s compliance with human rights law. The Human Rights Council is to hold three two-week sessions each year during which time they review the files of sixteen member states. Accordingly each state will undergo the review every three years. As of 2011, all 193 UN member states had undergone a review.

The Human Rights Council conducted Israel`s UPR in 2009.  In response to the findings, Israel`s ambassador to the UN explained that it took the Review process "very seriously" because it is "an opportunity for genuine introspection, and frank discussion within the Israeli system" 

Israel`s second UPR is scheduled to take place in 2013. A coalition of Palestinian human rights organizations submitted their concise report on Israel`s violations between 2009 and 2012.  This document will not be read, however, because Israel is boycotting the UPR, citing bias.  In May 2012, Israel described the Human Rights Council as “a political tool and convenient platform, cynically used to advance certain political aims, to bash and demonize Israel.”

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This is not Israel`s first attack on the UN. It has cited bias in the past in response to the UN`s critique of its human rights violations, specifically after the World Conference Against Racism (2001); the International Court of Justice proceedings on the route of the Separation Barrier (2004); denial of entry to Special Rapporteur to the OPT, Richard Falk (2008); and its refusal to cooperate with the Human Rights Council`s fact-finding delegation to Gaza in the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead (2009). 

Israel is unique for its boycott, which evidences the tenuous nature of the voluntary compliance process. In fact, human rights advocates and governement officials worry that Israel will open the door to non-cooperation by other states. The battle for accountability continues even in the UN. Despite its acceptance of international law & human rights norms, even within the multilateral human rights body, the last word on human rights matters is political.