[News] Joint Submission to UN Human Rights Committee on Israel’s Violation and Failed Implementation of the ICCPR
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Thu Feb 17 12:08:24 EST 2022
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Al-Haq and Partners Send Joint Submission to the UN Human Rights
Committee on Israel’s Violation and Failed Implementation of the ICCPR
On 31 January 2022, Al-Haq, “Law in the Service of Man”, Addameer,
Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Cairo Institute for Human
Rights Studies, Habitat International Coalition – Housing and Land
Rights Network, the Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, Al
Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Community Action Center/ Al-Quds
University submitted a joint parallel report to the United Nations Human
Rights Committee (HRC), detailing Israel’s violation and failed
implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political
Rights (ICCPR). The submission further showed that Israel’s violations
of the ICCPR are the result of its entrenching and maintaining of an
apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole, including
through its prolonged belligerent occupation.
The 77-page submission showed that Israel has been establishing,
entrenching, and operationalising its apartheid regime through strategic
fragmentation of the Palestinian People as a whole. The parallel report
illustrated how Israel is violating the Palestinian right to
self-determination by preventing the Palestinian people from exercising
sovereignty over their land and natural recourses. It further
highlighted the restrictions that Israel, the Occupying Power, imposes
on Palestinians preventing them from agricultural development, in
violation of Article 1 of the ICCPR. Moreover, Israel’s discriminatory
nationality and residency laws, policies and practices violate Article 2
of the ICCPR prohibiting discrimination, including racial discrimination.
The report exposed that Israel’s use of unnecessary and disproportionate
force and the denial of access to medical care to Palestinians, as
violating the Palestinians’ right to life, enshrined in Article 6 of the
ICCPR. It further demonstrated that Israel’s torture and ill-treatment
of Palestinians during interrogation and detentions, and its inhuman
practice of withholding Palestinian bodies are in violation of the
prohibition of torture as stipulated by Article 7 of the ICCPR.
Moreover, Israel’s arbitrary detention, including the campaign of mass
arrests and detentions after the Unity Uprising violates Article 9 of
the ICCPR, which prohibits arbitrary detention. Furthermore, that the
conditions of detention and deliberate medical neglect amidst the
COVID-19 pandemic amounts to violations of Article 10 of the ICCPR.
The report also outlined how Israel is violating the Palestinian
people’s freedom of movement through its annexation wall, checkpoints,
closure and military blockade, permit system and travel bans which
amount to violations of Articles 12 and 13 of the ICCPR. In addition,
the report illustrated how Israel’s military judicial system plays an
integral role in sustaining its apartheid regime. It further examined
how Israel’s systematic denial of the right to a fair trial, judicial
process and guarantees violates Article 14 of the ICCPR. Furthermore,
the report exposed Israel’s breach of Palestinians’ freedom of
expression, the right to peaceful assembly and freedom of association as
entailed in Articles 19, 21 and 22, including highlighting Israel’s
unsubstantiated smearing of Palestinian civil society organisations as
“terrorist organisations”. Israel’s racial discrimination and apartheid
regime violates Article 26 of the ICCPR which establishes that “[a]ll
persons are equal before the law and are entitled without any
discrimination to the equal protection of the law.”
The report concludes that “[s]ince the 2014 Concluding Observations,
Israel has failed to adopt the Committee’s recommendations and continues
to violate fundamental rights enshrined in the ICCPR.” It further noted
that the 2019 Concluding Observations of the Committee on the
Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) recognized the continuity of
Israel’s discriminatory laws, policies, and practices targeting
Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line and urged Israel to “give
full effect to article 3 of the Convention and eradicate all forms of
segregation between Jewish and non-Jewish communities and any such
policies or practices that severely and disproportionately affect the
Palestinian population in Israel proper and in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory.”
Finally, building upon the mounting recognition that Israel imposes an
apartheid regime over the Palestinian people as a whole, the
organisations called on the Human Rights Committee to recognize the
following:
* The HRC acknowledges the root causes of the situation in Palestine
as one of settler colonisation and apartheid. Through the strategic
fragmentation and segregation of the Palestinian people into
domains, Israel has ensured that Palestinians cannot meet, group,
live together, and exercise their collective rights, particularly
their right to self-determination in violation of the ICCPR,
including article 1 of the ICCPR.
* The continuity of Israeli discriminatory apartheid policies,
practices and laws on both sides of the Green Line impose racial
domination and oppression targeting the Palestinian people on both
sides of the Green Line and Palestinian refugees and exiles, who are
denied the right to return to their lands, homes and properties.
* Israel has imposed an institutionalized regime of racial domination
and oppression amounting to a regime of apartheid targeting the
Palestinian people as a whole in violation of the ICCPR.
1. We further recommend that the Human Rights Committee makes the
following recommendations to the State Party:
* Urge Israel to cease conferring public functions of the State to the
WZO/JA and JNF, which are chartered to carry out material
discrimination against non-Jewish persons and have historically
prevented the indigenous Palestinian people on both sides of the
Green Line from accessing or exercising control over their means of
subsistence, including their natural wealth and resources, by
exploiting and diverting Palestinian natural resources for the
benefit of Israeli-Jewish settler, exemplified by the latest cases
of Sheikh Jarrah and the Naqab.
* Demand that Israel repeals all legislation enshrining racial
discrimination, domination, and oppression, including repealing the
Basic Laws and other statutes that directly or indirectly affect the
enjoyment of human rights through racial and/or racialized
distinctions, including on the basis of religion. In particular, we
urge the Committee to call on Israel to repeal the following laws,
as foundational to Israel’s creation of an apartheid regime,
including but not limited to:
1. The Basic Law: The Law of Return (1950);
2. The Citizenship Law (1952);
3. The Absentee Property Law (1950);
4. The Entry into Israel Law (1952) and its amendments; and
5. The Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People
(2018).
* Declare that the Jewish Nation-State Law (2018) is antithetical to
the object and purpose of the Covenant as it has the purpose of
nullifying the recognition, enjoyment, and exercise, on an equal
footing, of all human rights and fundamental freedoms in the state
party and in areas under its effective control.
* Call on Israel to ensure family unification of all persons within
its territory or subject to its effective control, irrespective of
their ethnicity or national or other origin.
* Call on Israel to cease all measures and policies, which contribute
to the fragmentation of the Palestinian people, including the denial
of Palestinian refugee return, the closure of Jerusalem and of the
Gaza Strip, the construction of the Annexation Wall, and the
imposition of severe movement and access restrictions, as core
elements in Israel’s creation of an apartheid regime over the
Palestinian people on both sides of the Green Line and further
afield. We also urge the Committee to demand that Israel make
suitable and sufficient reparation to all fragments of the affected
Palestinian people, including Palestinian refugees and displaced
persons, as mandated by international law.
* Consider Israel’s persistent refusal to grant Palestinian refugees
and displaced persons their right of return to their homes and
property in their villages, towns, and cities of origin, as a core
element in its creation and maintenance of its apartheid regime over
the Palestinian people and reaffirm the right of return of all
Palestinian refugees and internally displaced persons to their
homes, property, and land which they were forced in flee in 1948 and
thereafter, and to call on Israel to comply with Article 12 of the
ICCPR.
* Urge the reversal of Israel’s policies and practices with regards to
demographic manipulation as a manifestation of the crimes of
population transfer and apartheid, in violation of Article 12 of the
Covenant, through the fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a
whole, the prolonged and illegal closure of Gaza, the closure of
Jerusalem and the precarious “permanent residency” status of
Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the imposition of two separate legal
systems in the occupied West Bank, and the denial of the
internationally recognised right of return of Palestinians living as
refugees and in exile.
* Demand Israel cease forthwith the ongoing closure of Gaza and lift
the blockade with immediate effect, lift restrictions on dual-use
items, and recognise that Israel’s discriminatory policies and
practices, amounting to the crime of apartheid, have already made
the Gaza Strip uninhabitable and violate the full spectrum of rights
owed to the Palestinian people, including Palestinian refugees, in
the Gaza Strip by denying them the enjoyment on an equal footing of
fundamental rights and freedoms.
* Reaffirm the findings of the 2004 ICJ Advisory Opinion on the
illegality of the Annexation Wall built in the occupied West Bank,
including in and around East Jerusalem, and call on Israel to uphold
its obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the
Annexation Wall, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein
situated, and to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all
legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto, in accordance with
international law.
* Call on Israel to reconsider its entire planning and zoning policy
in consultation with the indigenous Palestinian people directly
affected by Israel’s discriminatory measures, which include illegal
house demolitions and destruction of property, denial of access to
land and natural resources, and the creation of coercive
environments designed to drive Palestinian transfer. We further
recommend that the Committee consider Israel’s discriminatory
planning and zoning regime as a manifestation of the crimes of
population transfer and apartheid, in violation of Article 3 of the
Convention.
* Demand that Israel immediately ceases any and all practices of
intimidation and silencing of human rights defenders, organisations,
and members of civil society in violation of their right to freedom
of expression, including through arbitrary detention, torture and
other ill-treatment, institutionalised hate speech and incitement,
residency revocation, deportations, and other coercive or punitive
measures. In particular, that the Israeli Minister of Defence
rescinds the designations of the six leading Palestinian human
rights organisations as “terror organisations” both under Israeli
domestic law and under military order.
* Demand that Israel immediately ceases the construction of all
illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank, including occupied
East Jerusalem, and dismantle those already in existence, in
accordance with its obligations, as occupying Power, under
international humanitarian law and as mandated by international
criminal law, in particular the Rome Statute applicable in the oPt,
and to call for an end to Israel’s prolonged occupation of the
Palestinian territory, in line with Israel’s obligation to uphold
the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including
permanent sovereignty over natural wealth and resources.
* Call on Israel to release all political prisoners and to end its
widespread and systematic use of arbitrary detention and the use of
torture and other ill-treatment.
* Call on Israel to end the trial of Palestinian civilians in Israeli
military courts and to abolish the Israeli occupation itself.
* Call on Israel to end its practice of punitive residency revocation
and to immediately end the current process to revoke the residency
of Palestinian human rights defender Salah Hammouri.
* Call on Israeli and international corporate entities and financial
institutions to disengage from all activities which may render them
complicit, or otherwise contributing, toward serious violations of
international human rights and humanitarian law, or the commission
of international crimes, including those operating within illegal
Israeli colonial settlements in the occupied West Bank, including
East Jerusalem, and otherwise doing business with such colonial
settlements.
Please find the joint shadow report to the Human Rights Committee here.
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