Summary
Cofounder of Al-Haq (as Law in the Service of Man) and coauthor, with Raja Shehadeh, of its first publication, West Bank and the Rule of Law (1980) (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.19).
Details
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With Shehadeh he made public comparisons with South Africa’s apartheid system in the early 1980s (PDF p.24).
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It was Kuttab who informed the International Commission of Jurists of the Executive Committee’s approval context in 1979 and wrote “Good news: We have been officially registered” (PDF p.51, p.54).
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On LSM’s limited-shareholder design: “We wanted to make sure it wouldn’t be factionalized” “so we had to write the by-laws in such a way as to keep people out” (PDF p.54).
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He came late in 1979 as a Mennonite Central Committee volunteer after Wall Street corporate law, qualified at the Israeli and West Bank Bars, and became Steering Committee member responsible for the Fieldwork Unit (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.76, p.79).
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To the US House Foreign Affairs Committee in 1985 he described Israel’s annexationist course as creating “a classic de facto apartheid system” of separate structures for Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews (PDF p.77).
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After the al-Fara’a report the Israeli ambassador called LSM “a notorious front organization created by local PLO sympathisers”; Kuttab’s reply stated LSM was independent and duly registered and committed it “to amend, or retract any published material that is proven to be materially inaccurate” (PDF p.79-81).
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His January 1988 “Avenues” paper made specific, detailed, accurate documentation the first factor in working through the “court of public opinion”, and the universality principle — principles applied “to friend and foe alike” — a founding presumption (PDF p.81-82).
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He helped set up the Palestinian Center for the Study of Non-Violence and served on HURIDOCS’ governing Council from its 1982 founding assembly until 2009 (PDF p.78-79).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq, Raja Shehadeh HURIDOCS Mona Rishmawi