Summary
Palestinian researcher at Al-Haq quoted by Welchman on the marginalization Palestinian researchers felt in relation to foreign staff (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.117).
Details
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“Those of us working in the research unit always felt that foreign staffers were given more attention by the organization’s leadership, at the expense of more time and attention being invested with the Palestinian researchers. We felt we were marginalized” (PDF p.117).
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In Welchman part 5, she was recruited in the summer of 1987 to develop a women’s rights project at Al-Haq, and al-Haq’s second annual report included a separate chapter on violations of women’s rights during the intifada (Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, PDF p.172).
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Recruited to establish and coordinate the Women’s Rights Project in 1987, she records that the first intifada suspended sustained work on its internal aspects, and that the project later turned to gender-based violence in the Palestinian family and personal status laws, peaking with “Women, Justice and the Law: Towards the Empowerment of Palestinian Women” and its summer 1994 East Jerusalem conference, which closed with a mock tribunal (PDF p.192-193).
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Of the 1993 Vienna World Conference and its Bangkok preparatory meeting, which she attended for al-Haq: “it was a huge thing, my first real exposure; I came back asking: How can we use law as a tool? How can we refer to international human rights instruments?” (PDF p.193).
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As al-Haq’s director she closed the Legal Services Unit on the basis of a strategic review she carried out in 2005, explaining that other organizations were providing legal aid and al-Haq’s distinctive strengths lay elsewhere (PDF p.188).
Related pages
Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization, Al-Haq