Summary
The first Palestinian human rights organization, established in 1979 as Law in the Service of Man (LSM), the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, later known as al-Haq (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.12, p.18, p.30).
Details
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Its founders took a “nonpolitical” stance in defence of the “rule of law” in a dominant nationalist political culture, and it had outsized local, regional and international influence through innovative self-governance and data collection under long-term foreign military rule (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.12).
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It was invited into being through a 1977-79 correspondence between West Bank legal professionals and the ICJ in Geneva, and was officially registered in 1979 in a not-for-profit company form designed to avoid occupation regulation and partisan takeover (PDF p.30, p.45-54).
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Its first publication was West Bank and the Rule of Law (1980) by Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab; its Newsletter ran bimonthly in English and Arabic from May 1984 to the end of 1987 (PDF p.19-20).
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Its early work included the first public law library in the occupied territories, an “internal” agenda on workers’ and women’s rights, groundbreaking field-research methodology and a database, and a 1987 editorial reflecting on Israel’s “systematic colonisation of the West Bank and Gaza” (PDF p.25-27).
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Shawan Jabarin, who joined as a field-worker in 1987, became general director in 2006 and invited the history (PDF p.18). In 1989 the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize was awarded jointly to al-Haq and B’Tselem (PDF p.43-44).
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Affiliation was approved by the ICJ Executive Committee in October 1979; in January 1980 MacDermot signed an ICJ-LSM agreement with Nidal Taha, and the military censor’s refusal of the Arabic translation of his UN speech was apparently the first censorship of LSM material (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.55-57).
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After most of the original group left and voted to dissolve it, LSM was reconstituted under Raja Shehadeh and Jonathan Kuttab as codirectors with Charles Shammas on the Steering Committee (PDF p.62-63).
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Its first publication’s impact, the al-Fara’a torture report and Kuttab’s defence of its credibility, and its database (from 1984) and fieldwork methodology are treated in Chapter 3; it recruited its first paid staff in 1981 and by the end of 1987 was one of the biggest private employers in Ramallah (PDF p.67-88, p.90).
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The name Law in the Service of Man was phased out for al-Haq from the start of 1986 — the Arabic ‘insaan’ means “human being” — while the company registration remained LSM; its 1983 leaflet called its library “the first public law library in the West Bank” (PDF p.92-93).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, International Commission of Jurists, Raja Shehadeh, Jonathan Kuttab, Charles Shammas, Human Rights, Rule of Law Mona Rishmawi Nidal Taha HURIDOCS