Working paper: International organisations' efforts to protect human rights in Palestine — interventions and challenges

Introduction:

International law has shaped and governed the world across national and political borders: the International Criminal Court in The Hague seeks to set limits on wars and international conflicts, and international arbitration is essential to trade and international investment, alongside the other bodies of law regulating the nature of relations in the international system. Yet the world has not been free of the exploitation and abuse of domestic and international law to secure national gains and interests — which called for study of this exploitation within the legal field, producing a new term in the security domain: “lawfare”. The United Nations is the arena of this legal warfare, which is steadily increasing among international actors, especially the great powers holding the veto. Among those international causes is the Palestinian cause, where Israel seeks to strip Palestinians of legitimacy and prevent the establishment of their state. Despite all this, international law remains an instrument used by all states and non-state international actors in their international relations.

Hence the paper's importance: it discusses the international interventions to protect human rights amid the war raging in the Gaza Strip, alongside the continuing repeated incursions in the West Bank governorates, and the application of the rules of international humanitarian law as the legal guarantor for establishing and protecting human rights and delivering the necessary protection in environments of armed conflict and war. The paper's principal aim is therefore to clarify the role of international and diplomatic interventions in protecting human rights in Palestine, to discuss the challenges facing the work of international organisations in protecting civilians in armed conflicts and meeting the minimum of protection for the Palestinian people, and to ask how effective and important the international role is — and what might befall the Palestinian people in its total absence?

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