Summary
Legal scholar whose work on the West Bank legal profession — the lawyers’ strike, “over-control” and the dilemma of practising in the occupier’s courts — Welchman draws on throughout the early chapters (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.32-34, p.62, p.70-72).
Details
- His “over-control” names West Bank subjugation to Israel, Jordan and the PLO at once, with courts of interest to the authorities transferred to military courts or army-headed Objection Committees (PDF p.32-33).
- He estimates some 60 percent of West Bank lawyers were striking in the early 1980s (PDF p.33).
- He records the delegation of “young working lawyers” of the Committee of Working Lawyers (CAL) rebuffed and “violently castigated” in Amman, charged with complicity in the “Camp David Scheme” (PDF p.62).
- He came as a summer intern to LSM in 1982 while a Harvard law student (PDF p.70-71).
- In his post-Oslo socio-legal inquiry into cause lawyering he asks whether accepting the occupying power’s courts validated the “benign occupation” claim, and finds “on balance, Palestinians’ election to seek representation in Israeli courts, and lawyers’ choice to assist them, has been justified”, one result being help in building a Palestinian human rights movement (PDF p.71).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq, Raja Shehadeh