On 3 February 2020, a group of 14 Palestinian, regional, and international civil society organizations sent five joint written submissions on the human rights of the Palestinian People to the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council ahead of its 43rd regular session, which will be held in Geneva from 24 February to 20 March 2020.
Under item 2, the submission addressed Israel’s illegal closure of Gaza and Israel’s suppression of the Great Return March. The organizations called on the Human Rights Council and UN Member States to pursue justice and accountability for the widespread and systematic human rights violations committed against the Palestinian people and ensure implementation the recommendations of the 2018 UN Commission of Inquiry on the Great Return March in Gaza, which includes the immediate end to Israel’s illegal closure, which has made Gaza uninhabitable.
In addition, the submission addressed Israel’s systematic use of torture and ill-treatment of Palestinian detainees in Israeli interrogation centers, under item 3. The submission noted an escalation in the use of torture and other ill-treatment by Israeli occupying forces as embedded in a system of impunity with the complicity of Israeli courts. The organizations called for independent investigations into such cases and for perpetrators to be held to account in their own jurisdictions or through the International Criminal Court.
Under item 7, the organizations raised the issues of Israeli war on Palestinian education in occupied East Jerusalem and the on-going delay of the publication of the UN database of businesses operating in Israeli settlements as a matter of credibility for the Human Rights Council.
Finally, the submission under item 9 highlighted Israel’s strategic fragmentation of the Palestinian people as a means to maintain its apartheid regime. The organizations called on the Human Rights Council and Member States to recognize that Israel has established an institutionalized regime of systematic racial domination and oppression over the Palestinian people as a whole, as amounting to apartheid and to refrain from aiding in the maintenance of Israel’s apartheid regime.
Read the written submissions to the UN Human Rights Council here:
- Written submission on Gaza under item 2
- Written submission on torture under item 3
- Written submission on Jerusalem under item 7
- Written submission on the UN database under item 7
- Written submission on apartheid under item 9
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