 My name is Paul Webley, I'm the director of Versaise. I'd like to welcome all of you who've come here tonight. It's a full house. Ben was saying to me earlier, she was a bit nervous. I blame her family. I was asking who was here, she said, well, there's my husband and there's my mother and there's my father and cousins and all these other people and they're here to witness what will be a great occasion. So thank you all very much for coming, all the friends, all the relatives. I'll have to say it's the first time I've seen an astounding ovation before the talk. So this makes it a very special occasion indeed. Now, to just make sure it's enjoyable, I do have to ask you to turn off your mobile phones. People who often attend these things know that I'm hopeless at doing this myself, which is why I thought, oh, look, I'm learning. I've done it. Okay, good. So turn off your mobile phone, please. There's no plans to have a fire drill, given that we're not peculiar like that. That would be a cruel thing to do. So if the fire alarm does go off, the fire exit's a labelled fire exit. Okay. I'm very pleased to preside over this inaugural lecture. It's the third one of 2013. I'm really looking forward to it, as I know we all are, because Lin is someone I greatly admire. When she was head of the school of law, she was always clear, forthright, cogent and compelling. And lots of other positive things as well. So I'm really looking forward to this evening to ensure all those qualities will be on display this evening in her talk. Now, Lin will be introduced by Dr Zebo Miha Hussini, who's a legal anthropologist specialising in Islamic law, gender and development. She's a research associate at Saas's Centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law. She's held numerous research fellowships and visiting professorships. She's a founding member of the Masawar Global Movement for Equality and Justice in the Muslim Family. And as well as publishing numerous books, she's also directed with Kim Longanotto winning feature-length documentary films on contemporary issues in Iran, Divorce, Iranian Style and Runaway. The voter thanks will be given by Professor Anne Marine. He's the Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, an internationally recognised internationally famous scholar of Islamic human rights and human rights in cross-cultural perspectives in particular. His research interests include constitutionalism in Islamic and African countries, secularism, Islamic and politics. His current project includes the study of American Muslims and the Secular State, Human Rights, Universality and Sovereignty. We're very grateful to you both for being here this evening, helping us make this such a great occasion. Thank you very much indeed. After the end, you'll all be invited up to the Brunai Suite for some wine and canapes, and I say that now because sometimes at the end, people sort of stand around thinking, and now. So the end is upstairs for the reception. So to introduce Professor Lynn Welch, and I'm now going to pass over to Zebra. Over to you, Zebra. When Lynn asked me to introduce her for her in the inaugural lecture, I was very moved and honoured and gladly accepted. But soon I realised that it's not going to be an easy job. Many of us today will know what I mean when I say it is hard to capture the breadth and the depth of Lynn's scholarship and achievement. Let alone to Conway what an extraordinary person she is. Her dynamism, courage, her energy and the way she both lights up and energises any room, any gathering that she enters. Let me start with some biographical details that may not be familiar to some of us. One of Lynn's characteristic is that she does not dwell on the past, but is always with us in the present and looking to the future. So I had really to do some research before introducing her. Lynn studied Arabic and Persian for the BA in Cambridge, Clare College. After graduating with a first class degree in 1982, she taught for a year at Berzith University in Palestine. Then she joined Al Haq, one of the first human rights NGOs in the Arab world as a researcher. This was the beginning of a 15 years association with human rights organisations in the Arab world and elsewhere, including working with Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues. This association continues until this day and enriches her scholarship and the immense sense of purpose and energy that she devotes to whatever she takes up. It was in Palestine and her experience there working with women and human rights group that brought Lynn to law and prompted her to pursue postgraduate studies. She was wisely advised by her Cambridge supervisor, late Martin Hind, to come to SOAS, where in 1985 she completed with distinction the SOAS certificate in comparative law and proceeded to take on a PhD, which she pursued while continuing work with NGOs as well as serving as visiting lecturer in the Institute of Women's Studies in Berzith University. The institute was just born at that time. In 1993 she was awarded her doctorate for her pioneering study of Islamic Family Law in the Occupied West Bank, an area of research in which she soon became an authority. There followed a series of important posts in the international organizations and women's human rights NGOs in Palestine and elsewhere, including two years as interim coordinator for the International Council of Human Rights Policy, which is an independent organization that had started its work and only closed on in early 2012, after 14 years of valuable research. This was the post that Lynn left in 1997 to join the law department of SOAS as lecturer, bringing with her not only her valuable scholarship in law and in Islamic law and human rights law as well, but also her unrivaled experience of 15 years of work in the field. At SOAS, Lynn has served as head of department, as director and now deputy director of SEMIL, the Center for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, and as convener of International Human Rights Clinic. She has organized and taught several courses, including Islamic Law, Law and Society in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as Human Rights and Islamic Law. She has secured two grants for two major research projects at SEMIL. The first was a project on Islamic personal law in collaboration with Professor Ernaeem at Emory University. The second was a five-year project co-directed with Sarah Hossain, the Bangladeshi High Court barrister and activist for research on strategies of response to crimes of honor as violence against women. This project brought a number of young and established researchers to SOAS to work with Lynn and turned her office into a hub of activity and meeting, meeting place for ideas and inspiration that was to live in a book that Lynn and Sarah Hossain co-edited, honor crimes, paradigms and violence against women. Externally, Lynn is a member of editorial boards of numerous important journals and book series. She is also a trustee of the International Center for the Legal Protection of Human Rights and the Euro Mediterranean Human Rights Foundation. In addition to all this activity, Lynn has also managed to keep up a tremendous output of publication. Apart from a long list of articles and book chapters, she has herself written or edited six major books on Muslim family law, human rights and violence against women, all of which have been well received. Some of them are used as textbooks and some of them have had the attention of the media as well. Let me conclude with a more personal note about two main contexts in which I have come to know Lynn and admire and value her as a friend and a colleague. First, for several years now on Lynn's invitation, I have been teaching on two of her courses. I'm still amazed that every year, after the first two sessions, she knows the name of every single student, their interests, where they come from and what they want to do. And the way that she really combines academic rigor with humanity and with humour. Secondly, I was, as Paul mentioned, founding member of Musava, a movement for equality and justice in the Muslim family, launched exactly four years ago in Kuala Lumpur under the auspices of the well-established NGO Sisters in Islam. In 2010, Musava started a long-term multifaceted initiative to retain the notion of male authority in Muslim legal tradition and practice. And Lynn and I have been working closely together on this project. At the first meeting for this project, which was in Cairo, a number of invited Islamic scholars from Alasher took offence at some statements by project members. But Lynn, with her perfect Arabic, her erudition and sense of humour smoothly diffused attention and we were able to proceed with the discussion. In our collaboration, I have come to value and admire and cherish Lynn's integrity, her generosity and courage and her insistence on justice and at the same time, more than everything else, her in-betweenness, her extraordinary capacity to navigate different intellectual, political and geographical spaces and make her impact in each. These qualities have shaped her valuable scholarship and her great contribution to the cause of justice and human rights. Lynn has been friend, mentor, colleague, teacher and ally for many of us here, as well as source of hope and inspiration in dark and difficult moments. Director, ladies and gentlemen, it is my great honour and pleasure to ask Professor Lynn Welshman to deliver her inaugural lecture. Human rights and the Middle East, a thousand and one stories starting with Palestine. I just have to get myself organised. Sorry, I have two things. Sorry, glasses. Oh, I didn't mind about the stick but I thought I would get into this. Thank you very much, Zeba and thank you all of you for coming and for that clap. I'm almost crying before I start but I shall warm up. Thank you to Paul Webley and Dabdolahun Aeim in advance and for coming all the way and thank you to my seried ranks of my family and friends up there and in the elsewhere in the audience, many friends. I'm going to start now. I should start by saying that some of you may have assumed that the thousand and one stories which is the title tonight is supposed to invoke that classic work the thousand and one nights or the Arabian nights which you'll... it's a very sawass way to start in a way but I wouldn't want to threaten any toes in faculty of languages and cultures if anybody's here so I won't but there is a new translation in which the introduction by Robert Irwin tells us that in this work the stories are full of echoes and half echoes of one another like we current dreams in which the landscape is thoroughly familiar though what is to come is utterly unpredictable. One story frames another which in turn contains another within it and so on. The French refer to this sort of framing procedure as the mise en abime the thrust into the abyss. Irwin makes the point that in the end this is similar to the stories we all carry within us to all the stories of all human life and it's certainly immediately applicable to human rights stories. The echoes and half echoes the unfinished overlap and indeed unfinished business the utter unpredictability sometimes involving unintended consequences and even or perhaps especially in human rights the thrust into the abyss or many abysses that people see. But in fact the thousand one reference in my title was chosen not with this classic work in mind but rather with typical academic humility my own first human rights publication a text sorry what's true a text that compared with the Arabian night is admittedly less well known and indeed considerably shorter. My text was entitled A Thousand and One Homes Israel's demolition and sealing of houses in the occupied Palestinian territories. That title was itself intended to be evocative. Every one of those thousand and one Palestinian homes demolished or sealed over the period 1981 to 1991 three quarters of them during the first four years of the first Palestinian interfather framed the stories of the thousands of individuals and families directly affected by this policy there were homes after all. This little book was published in 1993 by the Palestinian Human Rights Organization Al Haq in support of their campaign against punitive house demolition for security reasons. The stories I want to invoke tonight and I know I don't have time for a thousand even if I speak as fast as I normally do which I'm trying not to I actually need some if you just talk amongst yourselves a minute I do need some water sorry. I want to talk about some of the many people I know in the Middle East including the founders of Al Haq who defied and continue to defy the dissonance often implied in the coupling of human rights in the Middle East you know you get this human rights in the Middle East the insistence on the challenges that face the integration of one with the other challenges that include the meanings of human rights and who says what they are the tenacity of the politically, socially and economically powerful the selectivity of the human rights agenda co-opted by powerful western states or the substance of the academic critique of the human rights project and it's important to note I'm not party to or encouraging of what academic critics have called the triumphalist narrative of human rights or the role the discourse has come to play in its association with power but the human rights practitioners of whom I speak tonight are not believe me in the least triumphal given what's happening they're not triumphal is well I think to recall some of their earlier stories given the ongoing challenges it may simply be that those who hear only the triumphalist narrative in human rights are not talking to the same people that I talk to Al Haq was the first Palestinian human rights organisation established in Ramallah in 1979 and my discussion today draws on the work of those early days so that's mostly framed and focused on the west bank legally and territorial at the time I worked for Al Haq in various capacities as Ziba said and over various periods from 83 to 93 and like many others I feel I've never really left the 80s were very intense and we led up to the first in Defada in 1987 and I learned a huge amount about the challenges and the possibilities of human rights about research and about building collegial relationships as a foreigner and given the history particularly in Palestine as a Brit and in the wider Middle East I learned my first Lord Al Haq it's all their fault and just in case I was beginning to think I had actually left my main research and writing effort over the past three years has been drafting a history of Al Haq's early beginnings and its formative years which I was asked to write by the organisation it reached this 30 year anniversary and they said will you write, I'm late in case anyone from Al Haq is watching I'm this close to finishing I'm just saying, look I'm on YouTube my PhD students know what that means I'm this close to finishing, right final draft, I'm this close to submission so to situate myself a bit I ended up at Al Haq because of two particular incidents at university at Cambridge and these of course are entirely subjective memories that have become part of my own history but are likely to remember differently if indeed at all by others with that caveat at the Cambridge University Ambulance International Group I invited a speaker to address the situation of Palestine university students in the occupied territories and she was heckled I mean nobody got heckled at the Ambulance International Group we were terribly earnest and you know we didn't heckle usually but this was an issue where the identity of the rights bearers apparently affected their very right to claim and that stuck and then in my final year by then I was involved with the Palestine society I was involved in an effort to twin Cambridge with Beirysate University in the West Bank it was overambitious it's true it was 1982 the year Israel was to invade Lebanon and unsurprisingly for those days we were roundly defeated as I recall it the argument would be lost when someone would stand up and say yes well of course I agree with all that in principle but what about the PLO that Monty Python bit with the Spanish Inquisition that's how I remember the phrasing would go but more seriously the suggestion that Beirysate was some kind of hotbed of terrorist activity reflected both the assumption that the argument of Israeli security could trump even the principle of Palestinian rights and the then very common conflation of Palestinian nationalist aspiration and activity such as students raising the flag with terrorism now I really don't like losing arguments especially a vote to involved so after I finished my degree I left the Beirysate I thought I'll go and come back and I'll say no no no it's not really this was against the immediate background of the massacre at Sabar and Shatila and in Ramallah I found I'll hop and as I said my current research involves looking back at those times at the start of the Palestinian rights movement and it has been the most difficult piece of writing I've ever done I know I've already said I'm late and it's too long but everybody here knows that as well there are so many stories from the energy of collective endeavour conviction born of principle bewildering defeats and bitter losses exasperating political contingencies the many small wins that were not small at all for the individual concerned and also inevitably as a researcher who was herself involved however peripherally with the work of the organisation during that time I've come up against the issue of inside or outside or what Zeba said in betweeny what did you say it wasn't in betweeny inside or outside in a very direct way being a foreigner working for a Palestinian human rights organisation was something I did think about at the time and the role of foreign researchers and the extent to which I'll hack especially in its early days was dependent on their contribution for its output particularly in English on the law was certainly something that the founders worried about in the early years in the organisation and excuse me I'd have to sort of bring up my positioning sometimes when I was doing interviews for this study and I had to sort of volunteer inside out being you know not being obviously being a Brit when I was discussing with former colleagues Palestinian colleagues from Al Haq and I got two responses I was told you know Lynn I never really thought of you as a foreigner which is very nice and then I had you know Lynn I never really thought of you as a researcher which was not quite as reassuring frankly still well I'm sure it was meant well it just didn't I still among the things that have struck me in doing this particular piece of research is the intense contingency of the initiative taken by those who founded Al Haq a few people in a particular place at a particular time acting from a need to find creative and practical ways to respond framed by a set of particular political developments and an opening prospect for solidarity which is what the human rights movement was giving and given the fact that two of them were practising lawyers they chose to act through the law the law with its association with power and the powerful the authorities who make it and enforce it and in the case of Palestine not only under the British mandate but Israel's much insisted commitment to the rule of law did I just lose my space no in the occupied Palestinian territories this presented more as rule by law with hundreds of military orders regulating and restricting almost every aspect of public and economic life and legalising the alienation of Palestinian land to further Israeli settlement policy and as in the case of the 1945 defense emergency regulations which were originally issued by the British mandate authorities who tried them out before in Ireland some of them in the 1920s they were providing for draconian punishments including house demolition for Palestinians who resisted the occupiers agenda and then again the law with its potential for empowerment and protection against the powerful particularly when the powerful take the law seriously or at least when they're obliged to take it seriously now international human rights law of course started from that premise the constraint of governments in their treatment of people under their control alhaq's focus on the law was not an obvious one then it may seem obvious now it wasn't obvious then and there are those who feel that the legalistic focus of much professional human rights work today obscures the more movement based value driven impetus in its origins and in much of its more popular manifestations but it easy to easy to forget just how quickly the visibility of human rights and the need of international law and the NGO movement associated with their promotion have grown in a relatively short space of time to become an integral part of public discourse and at least in some part of policy making and at the same time and this is what concerns many of us the manner that human rights policy is invoked by policy makers in powerful western states such as this one in their foreign relations is one of the major challenges to local human rights groups and actors in the Middle East it's hugely complicated complicating the selectivity of this discourse fees directly into arguments well I'm paraphrasing here that human rights is a hegemonic discourse that oils the engine of western neo imperialism and I've heard I mean that's that's the broad thrust of it and it has a lot of that dreadful word traction that traction in April 2011 I had the privilege of being at one of the very first seminars bringing together human rights and democracy activists and academics from different countries of north Africa in the Middle East after two European Arab rulers both close allies of the West for decades had been forced from power by popular protests that you will know already being termed and the Arab Spring there I heard a formidable to remarkable formidable Tunisian human rights activists and he told the meeting that European Union human rights policy towards north Africa had been a spectacular failure speaking in French it sounds better in French actually but spectacular failure the Tunisians and others in the region had for decades asserted claims to protection guaranteed under human rights law in practice despite EU conduct and not because of it the Tunisian League for Human Rights was by most assessments the first politically independent human rights group to be established in the region Middle East north Africa in 1977 and Al Haq was the second there were challenges that groups in north Africa and Al Haq had in common and there were others that were very different the major structural difference of course was that Al Haq was working in a situation of military occupation am I reading too fast? Who said yes? We're all heading for the reception you've almost done this the major structural difference when Al Haq and groups elsewhere in the Middle East north Africa then well and now was that Al Haq was working in a situation of military occupation with no national government accountable not even theoretically to the Palestinian population in that situation Whom do you address with your demands for correction and remedy within a few years of its establishment Al Haq had developed a method of intervening with the Israeli military authorities on particular issues it seemed so obvious but it really wasn't straightforward inside the organisation for the Palestinian population the Israeli authorities had no legitimacy you addressed them if you had to you had to get a permit for the myriad permits that you needed to conduct daily life or travel or whatever what had happened to Sarno Daughter after they'd been arrested but to address the occupying power voluntarily as it were on matters of law and policy was controversial even inside the organisation to start with if you addressed the occupying authorities did that mean you recognised them you accorded them some form of recognition as someone told me any contact with the occupier was seen as immoral it was weird it wasn't done and here immoral goes to the principle of not recognising or cooperating while weird reflects not only the absence then total absence of what was to become a standard form of human rights practice not just Al Haq it was developing everywhere but also to the idea that there could be any point in raising issues of rights and legal principle with the forces responsible for their violation partly this was to do with the unfamiliarity of the human rights discourse language at that time which was a challenge Al Haq shared with the Tunisian League and other groups that were to be set up in the next few years in other Arab states in the late 70s and early 80s according to Waltz Tunisian leftists commonly dismissed human rights as a bourgeois notion and generally American Crystal has observed that the Arab nationalists left generally saw human rights as an issue of western origin designed to deflect concern from economic and social issues and indeed one of the concerns of southern human rights group in regard to most of the international groups which based in the west was international groups focus on violations of individual civil and political rights and a lack of attention to structural factors that underlay and perpetuated those violations the ICJ the international commission of jurists was something of an exception one of the reasons that Al Haq was set up was the ICJ's west bank affiliate I don't think it was chance politically the Helsinki Accords had just come in to frame east west cold war relations and he Carter had committed himself to human rights as a centrepiece of US foreign policy throwing himself into intense Middle East peace efforts Carter hosted the signing of the 1978 Camp David Accords that's important to remember between Israel and Egypt the Accords provided for the withdrawal of Israeli settlements and military forces from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula and for the implementation of autonomy or self-rule arrangements for the Palestinians of the occupied territories with the exception of occupied east Jerusalem which Israel had annexed unlawfully the PLO was based in Lebanon to remove to Tunis after Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon and the seizure of Beirut and it was the fact that Arab governments were not only seen to stand by during that episode but also repressed demonstrations by their own nationals against the Israeli action that according to Joe Stork prompted human rights to take organisational form in Egypt the PLO had not been a party to Camp David nor had the Palestinian population been consulted and Egypt's declared goal of achieving Israel's agreement to Palestinian self-determination was not realised the Camp David Accords were widely protested in the territories and the co-optation of the language of human rights by the US president hardly had the effect of legitimising the discourse in the region for his part Carter never entirely disengaged from the area into which he had put so much energy and with so few of the results that he had apparently in good faith anticipated the title of Jimmy Carter's 2006 book Palestine peace not apartheid is designed to promote to provoke a primarily US audience into acknowledging the reality of what he calls abominable oppression today in occupied territories as was the case with its Arab counterparts the fledging Al Haq was concerned from the outset with survival the difference here was the matters on which the relevant authorities would act to foreclosed activities and closed organisation down and arrest in the case of Palestine this was essentially any indication of activity deemed to manifesting nationalism Palestinian nationalism membership of any faction in the PLO and any contact with the organisation was illegal and all manner of activities expressive nationalism were criminalised including raising the flag in the words of the late Gabby Baramki who for 19 years was acting president of Brzeig University whenever someone raised a Palestinian flag which was often the military would intervene it was a symbolic action the students way of asserting themselves as Palestinians the flag fluttering in the air affirmed our presence besides the reactions of the occupying power the founders of the young Al Haq had also to contend with a complex internal political situation broader speaking this was sort of shared by their counterparts elsewhere in the Middle Eastern North Africa the idea of pursuing human rights work is of political affiliation which is not the same as saying that human rights is not political in the grand scheme of things although that's something that's said more easily these days than it is now the movement also has moved on the human rights movement but in the West Bank and Gaza at that time political affiliations were very closely drawn and in the absence of lawful organised political parties that was all unlawful under the military orders party politics were conducted through other structures and there was a resulting tendency to describe to any group or organisation a political character in the sense of associating it and those who ran it or worked with it or directed it mostly with a particular PLO faction or alternatively with loyalty to the Jordanian regime in the West Bank or to more dubious parties formist among these the CIA this was a particular challenge in the effort by Al Haq to be and to be seen both as non-political and as non-partisan unlike its counterparts in Tunisia Egypt and Morocco Al Haq was not a membership organisation rather than seeking to draw in a range of political actors in support so the other groups tended to get well-known politicians from all different sort of sides and parties and have them as advisory councils or executive and so on in order to give this to prove that actually it was not affiliated with a particular one Al Haq did was to not be a membership organisation but sought to create amongst its staff members a character of human rights activists inside the organisation but still people asked are they PFLP or are they CIA or are they what people PFLP is popular front for liberation of Palestine not everybody knows all these acronyms a worker from the 1980s told me that he remembers before he joined Al Haq wondering about the people behind Al Haq and thinking maybe they were liberals and as a Palestinian Marxist liberals wasn't a term of endearment I think it's not amongst many students these days but that's a different country in a different time and I'm talking here but then this particular worker read Al Haq's Arabic translation of the ICJ's 1966 text The Rule of Law and concluded that the concept was not in fact in conflict with his commitment to what he called the bigger national cause of the people's liberation and self-determination there's two related issues that arise here the first is Al Haq's relationship with the ICJ with the International Commission of Jurists and its rule of law focus which is too much to go into now but it was quite distinct from the idea of human rights per se to start with and the link to or lack of conflict with the cause of self-determination the then secretary general of the International Commission of Jurists Neil McDermott was very differently placed to his Palestinian colleagues and he came from a background in politics in fact in the British Labour Party just after Al Haq had become a affiliate in 1979 McDermott made a presentation at UN Headquarters in which he explained how unacceptable to the Palestinians are the so-called autonomy proposals of the Camp David Agreement and he urged the inclusion of the PLO in negotiations based on acceptance by the people of Israel of the idea of self-determination for the Palestinian people and their eventual right to erect their own sovereign state he was speaking at a UN forum in his own capacity but I would very uncommon statement for an international human rights leader person to make then or even now actually I think for many maybe more what do you think maybe more now but certainly not then for its part working in the Occupied West Bank Al Haq only on particular occasions invoked on principle the right to self-determination but it didn't analyse it and did not comment then on the future disposition of the territories this is for survival the idea of not doing something that could be accused of being political so the organization's rule of law approach focused on the structural violations being perpetrated by the occupying power Israel with the aim of securing permanent Israeli control over much if not most of the land of the west bank including East Jerusalem in particular this aim was facilitated in the west bank by the changes made to existing Jordanian law and justice system by Israeli military orders the founders of Al Haq were clear that serious violations of civil and political rights and collective punishments such as house demolitions were committed with the aim of reducing resistance by the population to Israel's pursuit of this primary annexations agenda in other words they were clear from the start there was a structural link you have the agenda and then you have other things that are supplemental to and in order to enable the pursuit of that primary agenda and both the annexations agenda and the violations of fundamental rights that it entailed and that were carried out in support of it were and are entirely prohibited by international humanitarian law here was another challenge for Al Haq the question of the law international human rights organizations then did not address issues of IHL international humanitarian law they didn't address IHL as a rule or even a tool sometimes things were simply out because they were IHL and they weren't human rights law such as house demolition IHL was most of the concern of the international committee of the Red Cross and military lawyers in different parts of the world including Israel which had an expertise on this there was nothing approaching today's scholarly and practitioner interest in the laws of war there was a particular gap regarding the application of international humanitarian law after decades of military rule by an occupying power and in addition while Israel acknowledged that it was bound by the Hague regulations of 1907 part of customary international law although again an exception was made for East Jerusalem because of the annexation Israel had since autumn 1967 formally refused to acknowledge that it was bound by the 1949 4th Geneva Convention relative to the protection of civilian persons in time of war the 14th convention in defiance of the consensus of the international community as for human rights law Israel was not to ratify the two international human rights covenants until 1991 and the extension of this body of law to occupy territories and war zones was not yet a matter investigation we hear a lot about that now but as it was back then the covenants had only just come into force in 1976 so it was all very new the argument that an occupying power would be bound by its obligations under human rights law had not been made let alone one at this point for Palestine a landmark in this part of the legal struggle came with the International Court of Justices 2004 advisory opinion on the legal consequences of the construction of a wall in the occupied Palestinian territory so in the absence of Al Haq began by mapping the changes made to local law by Israeli military orders and their effect on the Palestinian people's access to the land and livelihoods and documenting the measures taken against the population by the authorities in response to resistance to that agenda and in a wider policy of intimidation of the population both these aspects were critical one of the major challenges of the time was that people some people here will remember that at least in the West Israel had been largely successful in presenting its conduct in the occupied territories as that of a benign occupation it was Rajesh Ahad one of the co-founders of Al Haq has called it the most benevolent occupation in history and at the same time there's a quote from a woman who was a representative of Human Rights Watch who told us once that at least in the United States Palestinian was an adjective requiring the noun terrorist the idea of a benign occupation was perhaps the main challenge on the international front during those years when the first interfather erupted in 1987 of course that image was drastically changed it was not the same question about getting the information out it was more about how to what to do with so closer to home human rights activism being unfamiliar then there were some who questioned whether Al Haq's work was somehow trying to make the occupation look better whether in fact what it wanted was a better behaved occupying power rather than an end to the occupation and whether achieving the first better human rights compliance would reduce the urgency of achieving the second the end of occupation it wasn't until the first interfather in the context of its enforcement project under the leadership of co-founder Charles Chamest I'm being careful because he's here somewhere there he is Charles that Al Haq articulated the structural argument linking rule of law principles with the end of occupation to show that the logic of the law is otherwise that is duly enforced by Israel's co-parties of the convention other states the law would serve not to preserve the occupation but rather both as a holding mechanism for the status of the territories and the rights of the population in the interim and a facilitative mechanism towards ending the occupation that is properly enforced both protects a baseline of rights for the civilian population and underpins the terms of customary international law by rendering an annexation agenda illegal in and of its own right properly enforced the law ensures that an occupying power has little prospective gain in prolonging the occupation it can't have the resources it can't keep the land so at the same time the law underpins the sustainability of political dispute resolutions by reducing the likelihood of derailment by serious violations such as announcement of new settlement plans to one processor ongoing it's quite a key link to make you hold a position and make negotiations possible and once they're possible make it sustainable explained like this it seems quite straightforward I hope yes is the right answer there but it's okay seems quite straightforward but this argument about the political utility of the law was not uncontroversial at the time these days influential commenters and this is happening now if you're reading the news influential commentators call for the prospect of law based sanction to underpin calls on Israel to desist from its most recent settlement construction plans as E1 thing around East Jerusalem announced after the vote on the upgrading of Palestine status at the UN lake last year in the interest of sustaining a new peace process a new peace process that some say is the last chance for the two state solution to which the west has in principle committed itself although in practice it has done very little to protect the prospects for its realisation Al Haq's voice on the end of occupation is far more direct now than in its early years times are different and the human rights movement itself in Palestine and outside globally has different understandings of itself Shawen Jabrin as Al Haq's current director has criticized human rights organisations that do not address the occupation per se as the occupation not just what it does and hold that demands to end the occupation are political for his part prominent Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfad has rejected the argument made by those he calls human rights neutralists which is quite like that phrase to the effect that there should be no link between objecting to human rights violations and objecting to the occupation this is what he argues the neutralists argue shouldn't make that link in reviewing a work on the role of the Israeli High Court of Justice Sfad addresses the existential dilemma of the human rights lawyer with his question from the perspective of human rights and of those who seek a quick end to the occupation was and is the justice ability of the occupation a positive development in other words making it possible for passing petitions to go to the Israeli Supreme Court has that is that likely to have furthered the work trial is that ended furthering work towards any occupation was in fact sustained it this goes both to public image and to internal dynamics public image of visual itself a state of law and internal dynamics amongst people who choose to go and not some petitioners choose not to go they don't want to give legitimacy to the court this also recalls earlier questions by law professor George Bisharat of UC Hastings as to whether the choice is made by Palestinian lawyers to act in the courts of the occupier on behalf of the Palestinian defendants worked in fact to sustain the occupation by drawing energy away from the political struggle challenging anger into what he called relatively harmless forms this was a discussion that was going on when there was a lawyer's strike in the 70s in the West Bank and this in turn invokes the concern of some that human rights work was a part of a liberal project to to tame or defang the Palestinians as a national movement there is something of a consensus that Israel's decision to allow Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza to petition its supreme court for redress which on balance has been very rarely forthcoming was due to Israel's investment in its image and its self-perception importantly as a state committed the rule of law it is also the case that Israel responded and responds with vigor when this proposition of it being a state committed the rule of law when this proposition is challenged sociology professor Lisa Hajar has examined this and other aspects of Israeli rule in occupied Palestinian territories and identifies Al Haq's first publication The West Bank and the Rule of Law by co-founders Shahad in Jonathan Cotab and the rejoinder which is published by the Israeli national section of the ICJ International Commission of Juris she says these two publications were the start of a cycle of criticism and rejoinder that would come to characterise the production of knowledge about the legality of Israeli rule and this argument the legal argument goes on and on and you can see it in the papers I put my hands down from the beginning of Al Haq's work then it was clear that the Israeli legal establishment would respond vigorously to Palestinian attempts to establish a narrative of the legal and human rights situation in the occupied territories that differed from that of the official Israeli narrative the very great Stanley Cohen most recently professor of sociology at the LSE down the road the other place as we sometimes call it and in his time a significant actor in Israeli human rights movement classified the possibilities of denial by states including Israel of human rights abuses according to exactly what is being denied literal, interpretive and implicatory in the second interpretive denial what he says is that the raw facts something happened are not being denied they're not being challenged rather they're given a different meaning from what seems apparent to others it's very important I was going to go back to my book on house demolition 1001 homes here because there's a starting example here also in the first Al Haq book on that of Cohen's interpretive denial from a ruling by the Israeli High Court in the mid 80s which basically held the quote is much better than I can summarise but they basically held that house demolition did not in fact constitute collective punishment and I think that's a classic case of interpretive denial but I thought that instead we might take this moment to pay tribute I hope this is okay to pay tribute to Stan who died here in London earlier this month and to say that all his friends and admirers here tonight salute him and his work his brilliance his passion he had absolute integrity and his jokes and just to say that we miss him and I'd like to just remember Stan thank you by the early years of the first in Te Fada Al Haq was only one of an increasing number of Palestinian human rights organisations in the West Bank and Gaza that's quite a crowded field now there's quite a lot as you'll know if you keep involved a very interesting collective work now so all the dynamics anyway and indeed Israeli groups working on human rights in the territories during this time there were certain moves on the part of EU states towards a law based approach to the conflict they were considering ways of encouraging Israel's compliance with its obligations under international humanitarian law particularly the Forcing Convention but as of the spring of 1991 these developments and initiatives were frozen in deference to the US-led political initiative in the region that in 1993 led to the Declaration of Principles and subsequently the Oslo Accords and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and in these processes as Charles Schimers again was won't to say at the time the sponsoring states and particularly the US seemed to regard international humanitarian law more as an obstacle to the peace process than as a set of norms they were bind to uphold and potentially as a facilitating mechanism in their aspiration to facilitate conflict results thus while Israeli settlement policy was and is frequently denounced as an obstacle to the peace process or the prospect of restarting one so the international norms that prohibit that policy absolutely are for their part found politically disruptive for its part the PLO failed to insist on the law as the basis on which political agreement should be negotiated and based and the Oslo Agreements pursuing the arrangements in those first Camp David Accords were or at least have been treated as largely international law free nor have the guarantors made effective efforts to restrain Israel's pursuit of its annexationist agenda since then now if this sounds like so much history my point is that Palestinians have contributed to the development and understandings of international humanitarian and subsequently human rights law from an intensely practical position as well as principle they have asserted their right to claim the protections of the law to which this country the UK and others proclaim commitment and time and again Palestinians are told effectively that they must put aside the law and that they must submit to the existing political balance with the dubious support of EU partners and the even more dubious support of the US as honest broker in their attempt to prevent further encroachments on their right to self-determination to their livelihoods and the right to live on their own land in only the most recent example I'm sure you've all been following the news Britain along with other EU states was reported to have been trying to secure a commitment from the Palestinian political representatives at the UN in return for support at the UN Britain's support for the vote on Palestine's upgrading to non-member observers status to return to the Palestinians should return to negotiations with Israel without any preconditions including in regard to settlement construction and to refrain from seeking membership of the international criminal court since any effort to extend the jurisdiction of this international criminal court over the occupied territories could derail any chance of talks resuming Palestinian human rights groups objected to any such concession and urged the immediate signature of the court statute by the state of Palestine to strengthen prospects for accountability and actually I just saw it this morning that recent reports quote the Palestinian foreign minister suggesting that Israel's recent settlement plans might force their hand on this Palestinian human rights groups also urged ratification of human rights instruments to bind Palestinian governmental practice Assam Eunus of El Misen Human Rights Group and Rafa but formerly of Al Haq as well Assam of El Misen added that Palestine must be clear that justice and law work both ways when we call for an international court to investigate grave violations of international law and gross violations of human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory we should expect it to look at alleged violations by the Palestinians two issues arise here the first is that of the exercise of universal criminal jurisdiction over those accused of committing grave breaches of the fourth Geneva Convention Al Haq in fact had explored this in the late 1980s since this was and is the only measure of enforcement that state parties to convention are under an obligation to take everything else's you've got to try and realise this but doesn't say how what measures you have to use to ensure compliance or to encourage compliance and at that time as I said before you can't imagine how bare the field was on these things there was much less interest, knowledge and activity around the issue of universal criminal jurisdiction than is the case now but certainly British officials knew enough even then to studiously avoid referring to grave breaches of the convention when committed by Israel we did have a case in 1991 when Iraq there was grave breaches Britain was talking about they wouldn't talk about it when they were committed by Israel at the same time that was a that was one of the things that was a bad moment it was not until later that move towards grave breaches prosecutions in third states began in earnest by the end of the first decade of the 21st century networking by activists and lawyers in Palestine led by the Gaza based Palestinian centre for human rights and different third states including here had become part of what has been termed law fair I.L. Reitman wrote recently that against the background of the UN's Goldstone report which came after Israel's operation cast letting Gaza 2008-9 so after the Goldstone report Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu told the Israeli Security Institute that and I'm quoting, organisations that claim to support the principles of human rights and international law were the third strategic threat to Israel's security that's third after Iran and Hezbollah I mean that's I suppose you could talk about impact in this result I don't know but anyway as we academics have to these days when these non-governmental efforts resulted in a couple of near misses in London the British government reportedly assured the Israeli government that Britain would change its law in order to constrain the prospect of Israeli officials being held accountable for their alleged involvement in the perpetration of grave breaches of the 14th Convention including during operation cast led a similar law averse position or rather an aversion to giving any substance to the prospect of legal of law-based constraint or legal remedy has been taken by western states in regard to the recommendations made in the 2004 advisory opinion on the war that I mentioned before by the International Court of Justice I could go on I do go on frequently but I could go on but the point here is the message it sends about the law when Palestinians are told repeatedly that international humanitarian and human rights law is not properly the framework through which they should seek protection of their lives and their land this message is heard all over the Middle East and indeed beyond it is not politically naive to suggest there are better messages to send the second point arising from Eunice's statement is the attention given by Palestinian human rights groups to abuses by their own governing authorities since the establishment of the Palestinian authority after the Oslo Accords groups in Palestine have found themselves confronting challenges more similar to those faced by their Arab counterparts the particular challenges of confronting the occupation strategies vary of course in the years before the 2011 revolution in Tunisia there were regular but extraordinary displays of courage on the part of human rights activists seeking to claim rights from their government the Tunisia of that time under then president Ben Ali was distinguished by the effort invested by the government in promoting an image of strong commitment to international human rights principles as well as very important to Europe political stability but human rights advocates and political dissidents at home were subjected to very heavy handed measures of harassment and repression that sharply contrasted with this carefully cultivated and really vigorously protected image it was extraordinary the official narrative was exceedingly tightly controlled and a significant part of that narrative was consisted of stories about the law and in particular human rights related law Tunisia signed up to everything was very active in all the four United Nations but there was this real gap between practice and international exposure and dialogue on the subject if you like very interesting or disturbing I should say inside the country the absence of a forum for public debate on this issue in the media and the rules prohibiting unauthorized meetings which were quite strict rendered the courtroom as the site of urgent attempts by defendants and their defence council to deconstruct the official narrative and tell stories about the law other than those so carefully constructed and controlled by the state which included the court record the judges would say what could go in the court record and part of the fight was to try and get for example the defendants used the word I was tortured and the council would try to put the word torture and it was really I tended, you can probably tell a number of political trials in Tunisia in the 1990s and I wrote once about how in such a situation the court may take on even more of the form of a theatre than courts usually do on the one hand you had the staging of what were in some senses show trials well not least because they seemed to primarily to draw the red lines of dissent for a Tunisian audience the limits of rights and freedoms on the other hand defence council made their own dramatic interventions signing on in their scores to speak in defence of the accused or withdrawing individual on mass to protest at the conduct of the trial in the trial of one one human rights activist I attended there were 40 or 50 lawyers who signed on to act to speak in defence act as defence council and in later one over 100 lawyers turned up and I think that didn't even include the lawyers from neighbouring North African countries who presented themselves in solidarity it's very hard to convey the sheer physical intensity of the moment when the massed ranks of robed lawyers pressed to the bar literally pressing forward when the court calls for the naming of council for the defence it really is an extraordinarily moving moment of collective it's to witness this moment of collective defiance and solidarity under an extremely repressive regime as was then and to understand how some of these people saw their own role one more story from Tunisia just a month after Ben Ali had departed in 2011 and I was an observer at a meeting between a visiting delegation of MEPs and a group of prominent and mostly veteran Tunisian human rights activists and there was an Italian MEP I'm fairly sure that he's from Bolasconi's party but I might have just projected onto him, I don't know and he sort of gestured around the room at these wonderful people who've been fighting you know, gestured around the room and said where are the youth, we want to meet the youth you know and it was, I almost walked out but I wasn't even part of the meeting but you know it was and so I didn't obviously it wasn't me so there was a woman there formidable history as a human rights activist and when it came her turn to reply to Tunisian well I can summarise in summary she said we were the resistance she said the youth led the revolution the people are the future you think he he didn't have the grace to look embarrassed, I'm sorry to say but we were all very moved so the human rights activists in the Middle East and North Africa with whom it has been my privilege to work are extremely reflective and they are deeply committed to their own countries and cultures they are of course deeply engaged perhaps entangled with the West notably with human rights fora and organisations based in Western Europe and the US but insistently as peers these are very complex relationships and there are at least two way usually more than two way and there is a gap in scholarship on the impact of local human rights organisations in the region on their international partners it tends to be the other way the relationships inevitably involve issues of power and of priorities of substantive meanings the domestic understandings and transformations of human rights values in specific contexts the ongoing resonance of colonial legacies the complications of funding and of donor agendas and I could go on alliances what I'm saying are necessarily complex but they are not unconsidered rights work in domestic context is equally complex my friends Abdullah Naeim and Ziba Myrhaeseni both address these matters in their scholarship and in their work, their activism and I'm aware that I've not actually considered the ongoing work tonight on Islam on human rights to which they are both leading contributors if from slightly different approaches Abdullah Naeim I should actually note is the reason I'm so he was largely responsible for convincing me to take up the job offer I had it so so we can blame him as well not that you should attract blame in any means Abdullah Naeim and I've also not had time tonight to consider the ways in which human rights groups around the region are engaging in what used to be called social issues Abdullah Naeim wrote a decade ago on what he called the phenomenon of human rights dependency in the Arab world whereby human rights groups based in the west report in the west on human rights violations in the Middle East and pressure governments in the west to take action with regard to Arab governments where the local human rights actors and indeed Arab populations mostly left out of this equation I'm not denying the challenges inside the global human rights movement nor yet the critiques of the power dynamics which are truly manifest in human rights in today's world I do think on the first that the relationship has developed somewhat since Abdullah here wrote that piece with the strengthening of the human rights movement in the region networking has become more easy I mean communication it makes a difference vigorous debates between and among them and intense discussions of strategies and challenges not least now with everything that's going on in different states in the region and on the second on this occasion I have to say I'm happy to insist that my own government should try at least to do less damage to the idea of human rights and the rule of law than has been the case particularly since 9-11 Palestine is not the only human rights or international law issue in the Middle East not by any means however as I'm here and while there's no reason whatsoever to think that anybody from the foreign office is watching I do never know it's still worth saying that it would go a long way to supporting these ideas in the region where the frankly substance light approached a Palestinian rights and international law that currently characterizes British engagement with the conflict and has for decades to be replaced with one based more effectively on the fundamental international law by which this country is in law already bound what can I say after all these years but thank you very much thank you good evening my task is brief and beautiful and I think very exciting I'm here to honour Lynn Welchman and to honour Akram Khattab her husband and partner in Sudan I'm from Sudan we say Akhuy which I think is Hanina, it's more affectionate so Akram is Akhuy and Lynn is Ukhti and this is actually how I see them and I see her work and her passion we just experience all of that this amazing mix of brilliance and passion that she is that I see her work in terms of what my teacher Mohamed Tahi used to call al-Alaiq al-Insaniya he used to say that it is in Arabic it can't be rendered in translation but I will say it first and then try to he says al-Alaiq al-Insaniya he arfa'u mafio wujud that human ties are the most supreme in the universe in the cosmos and I think that is what Lynn is about it is about these human ties in the quality of her scholarship and the commitment of her heart and passion for the cause of people and relationships to people human ties are the most supreme in the universe so the incident that Lynn referred to towards the end of her lecture was about in 1997 I had already known her for several years and we were working together with the international council for human rights policy and I used to meet her at various events and at inter-rights where she was based at some time and she came to like a fork or a parting ways or a point where she had to decide because on the one hand her passion, her commitment are to activism and to human rights promotion in the actual on the ground but she was also offered the position here at Sawas and she wanted to decide whether she could go into academia or continue to be an activist and I said there is no conflict in fact you can be more of an effective activist as an academic than you would be otherwise and I'm vindicated and I'm really heartened to see that 20 years later almost I can say it was all you modesty I was right so she kept her activism in the most effective way which is the quality of a scholarship because I think poor scholarship doesn't advance any cause so there is no conflict between true advocacy and true scholarship because they supplement and complement each other in that sense I think that for those of us who are puritan sort of scholarly types who think that activism somehow tends a scholarship that is not the case and the point for me is what is the point of a scholarship if it is not for social change I don't think that any of us can afford to be neutral there is no neutrality failure to take a position is a position for the status quo so those who think that by just simply keeping silent or burying my thoughts and ideas in sort of layers of ambiguity in the writing and said person type of talk as if that they are not taking a position they are taking a position for the status quo and if the status quo is one of injustice they are taking a position for injustice those who speak out and speak boldly and bravely and clearly as Llyndd does with the quality that is totally integral that is totally unassailable I think that is how scholarship and activism come to meet and they have been personified in Llyndd's personality all the time and I think that in making this remarks I was thinking how to I came all the way by the way from Atlanta, Georgia USA last night to honor Lynn and Akram and I think that what I was thinking about what could I say after all that she said and I know Ziba would have said and so all of you know because there are many students here who know her, money colleagues who know her how could I say it and just it came to me I just say it by touching on this anchor of human ties as the cause of our very being and our human ties and the way we care for them is what keeps academic institutions of this quality and caliber going and I think that when our scholarship and our commitments lose touch and concern for actual people's lives on the ground everywhere equally then we are not where our soul thank you very much for honoring Lynn tonight and I would like to invite her again one more time to meet you all and thank you don't forget the reception