Human Rights & Accountability

MEI/FMEP 2023 Briefing Series: Israel/Palestine – Key Issues for the 118th Congress

Part Three: Human Rights & Accountability

Recorded February 24, 2023

Featuring: Francesca Albanese (UN Special Rapporteur), Rabea Eghbaria (Harvard Law School), Shawan Jabarin (Al-Haq)

This session explored human rights conditions in Israel and the occupied territories, as they relate to both the Israeli government and Palestinian political actors in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as the broader question of accountability.

For more information on the 2023 Congressional Briefing Series, including additional webinars, please visit: https://fmep.org/mei-fmep-2023-briefing-series-israel-palestine-key-issues-for-the-118th-congress/

Biographies

Francesca Albanese is the UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinian Territories. She is also an Affiliate Scholar at the Institute for the Study of International Migration at Georgetown University, and a Senior Advisor on Migration and Forced Displacement for the think tank Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development (ARDD), where she co-founded the Global Network on the Question of Palestine (GNQP), a coalition of renowned professional and scholars engaged in/on Israel/Palestine. She has published widely on the legal situation in Israel/Palestine; her latest book, Palestinian Refugees in International Law (Oxford University Press, 2020), offers a comprehensive legal analysis of the situation of Palestinian refugees from its origins to modern-day reality. She regularly teaches and lectures on International Law and Forced Displacement in European and Arab universities, and speaks frequently at conferences and public events on the legal situation of Palestine. She worked for a decade as a human rights expert for the United Nations, including the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the Relief and Work Agency for Palestine Refugees. In these capacities, she advised the UN, governments, and civil society across the Middle East, North Africa, and the Asia Pacific, on the enforcement of human rights norms.

Rabea Eghbariah is a human rights attorney completing his doctoral studies at Harvard Law School. He worked as an appellate public defender before joining the Haifa-based Adalah Legal Center, where he argued major Palestinian civil and political rights cases. Rabea published on various subjects relating to Palestinians and Israeli law, including the censorship of online speech, the legal land regime, and the criminalization of Palestinian foragers. His writings appeared in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology, the Law and Political Economy Project, and the Journal of Palestine Studies, among others. Rabea previously served as an executive article editor of the Harvard Human Rights Journal and currently serves as an editorial member of Jadaliyya’s Palestine page.

Shawan Jabarin is General Director of Al-Haq, an independent Palestinian non-governmental human rights organization.

Resources

Follow our panelists on Twitter to stay up to date:

Francesca Albanese → https://twitter.com/FranceskAlbs
Shawan Jabarin → https://twitter.com/SJabaren
Rabea Eghbariah → https://twitter.com/RabeaEghbariah
Al-Haq → https://twitter.com/alhaq_org

Furthere reading:

“UN expert: ‘Apartheid is in front of your eyes everywhere you go’” (+972 Magazine)
Adalah maintains a database of over 60 discriminatory laws that discriminate against PAelstinian citizens of Israel: https://www.adalah.org/en/content/view/7771
For more on the recent law to revoke Palestinians’ citizenship, see Adalah’s explanation here.
Human Rights Watch report on Israel’s stripping of status from Palestinian Jerusalemites.
For further information on Israel’s criminalization of human rights work in the West Bank, see this list of resources (webinars, podcasts, and webinars) from FMEP
Check out Francesca Albanese in a recent FMEP webinar, where she discusses more about international law – “A War Crime in the Making: the UN’s Francesca Albanese on Ethnic Cleansing in the South Hebron Hills” (Recorded 01/16/2023)
A new book – with contributions from various experts – explores “The One State Reality”
FMEP recently hosted a webinar that unpacked how various frameworks – apartheid, settler colonialism, occupation – do (and do not) explain what is happening in Palestine: “Limited Paradigms”
For resources on the weaponization of anti-semitism to quash criticism of Israel, see these FMEP resources.