Summary
The Swiss humanitarian agency focused on international humanitarian law and described as the “guardian” of the Geneva Conventions, whose confidentiality policy and reluctance to speak out publicly over Israel’s occupation became Al-Haq’s most significant disagreement with an international partner (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.148).
Details
- ICRC delegates arrived in Israel a few days before the 1967 war; Moorehead, writing in 1998, noted Israel is “the only country which the Committee has never judged sufficiently peaceable to enable it to withdraw all its delegates” (PDF p.148).
- Its record regarding Jewish and other victims of Nazi Germany is described as one in which the ICRC “lost its normative compass”, a history that goes to its deployment of its confidentiality policy and decisions on when to speak out (PDF p.148).
- In LSM’s early days ICRC delegates — a role then restricted to Swiss nationals — were in regular contact and dialogue with LSM from the start (PDF p.148).
- Early in the occupation the Israeli government declared it wished “to leave in abeyance for the time being” the question of the applicability of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and in 1972 it declined the ICRC’s formal offer to act as an official substitute for the protecting power, claiming it would abide by the Convention’s “humanitarian provisions” but not its “political provisions” — a distinction the Convention itself, the ICRC and state parties do not recognize (PDF p.148-149).
- Under the 1978 ICRC–Israel agreement, the government undertook to inform the ICRC twelve days after any arrest of Palestinians from the occupied territories and grant access within fourteen days; the delegate could speak to the detainee “only about his personal situation and the state of his health” and was “prohibited from transmitting any information whatsoever to an outside body or to the family of the detainee other than the date of arrest, the place and date of visit and the detainee’s state of health” (PDF p.149).
- In 1977 the ICRC made a public statement that problems it had been raising regularly with the Israeli authorities remained unresolved and delegates were still not allowed to see detainees under interrogation (PDF p.149).
- In 1992 the ICRC stated publicly, through private interviews with those under interrogation, that “to obtain information and confessions from detainees, means of physical and psychological pressure are being used” in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, and that its representations to the Israeli authorities had had no effect (PDF p.150).
- Shehadeh noted the fourteen days before ICRC visits gave the authorities ample time to isolate and interrogate and mistreat detainees, and that “in the opinion of many ex-prisoners, the visits of the ICRC were of little, if any, significance or practical help”; during the first intifada al-Haq itself could find out some detained field-workers’ whereabouts only through the ICRC (PDF p.149).
- Al-Haq objected that “It is the Israeli authorities’ practice to refer to the Red Cross visits whenever allegations are made about prison conditions, as though the silence of the Red Cross disproves the allegations” (PDF p.149).
- The ICRC’s director of Principles, Law and Relations with the Movement wrote to the British MPs convening the 1989 enforcement symposium: “The ICRC considers it vital that the States party to the Geneva Conventions take all possible steps to ensure respect for that body of law” because states undertook “not only to respect the said Conventions themselves, but also to ensure respect for them by other States in all circumstances. This is the tenor of Article 1 common to the four Conventions” (PDF p.154).
- President Peter Maurer’s paper in the 150th-anniversary International Review of the Red Cross occupation issue recorded that the ICRC “has been unable to engage in any meaningful dialogue with the Israeli government” on East Jerusalem’s annexation, the West Bank Barrier’s routing and settlement expansion, and had therefore opted to engage civil society, academia and the Israeli public directly (PDF p.151).
Where sources disagree
- Al-Haq, in its second intifada report, held that the ICRC’s silence could be interpreted as tacit approval and that its continued presence might become counterproductive, while the Review’s editor-in-chief, Bernard, insisted on the effectiveness of the confidentiality approach “from the humanitarian point of view” while stressing it was not unconditional; Shehadeh in 2012 concluded “the ICRC did not speak out when it should have” (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.150-151).
- Alan Baker, in a solicited response to Maurer, repeated the official Israeli position that the Convention did not apply, rejected the designation “occupied Palestinian territory” as “inaccurate historically and legally, and […] inherently and clearly politically slanted”, and argued public engagement would run “contrary to the fundamental principle of neutrality” (PDF p.151-152).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq, Enforcement Project, Raja Shehadeh