Summary
Cofounder of Al-Haq (as Law in the Service of Man) who recruited Lynn Welchman to LSM in 1983 (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.14).
Details
-
He met the International Commission of Jurists in Geneva in summer 1978, where the question of approaching Justice Haim Cohn was raised with him (PDF p.51).
-
With Raja Shehadeh he paid Cohn an informal visit; he recalls they were struck by “how completely unaware he [Cohn] was of the practices of the military government” (PDF p.51).
-
He frames al-Haq’s work as struggle (PDF p.25), and hosted Welchman in the MATTIN space next door to al-Haq during research visits (PDF p.15).
-
The only nonlawyer of the three founders; his shock was the “culture of dependency” of patronage and subsidy, and the first form of control, he held, is economic (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.84-85).
-
He founded MATTIN in the West Bank after arriving in 1976, testing European Community commitments on direct export and documenting Israeli obstruction; the factory was eventually forced to close (PDF p.85-86).
-
Al-Haq’s Enforcement Project, growing from his third-party-state obligations work, took institutional form in 1988 and departed amid controversy in 1992; in London in 1989 he argued third-party guarantors must demonstrate commitment to enforcing humanitarian law (PDF p.84, p.86-87).
-
He pioneered al-Haq’s database: the 1984-85 draft “Whence and Why the al-Haq Database?” rejects a bibliographic system for events as units of analysis to discover patterns to act on, usually locally (PDF p.87-88).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq, Raja Shehadeh MATTIN HURIDOCS