On 28 February 2022, HIC-HLRN joined a statement to the United Nations Human Rights Committee (CCPR) during its NGO formal briefing on Israel’s fifth periodic review of its performance of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR).
The statement, on behalf of Palestinian HIC Member organizations and allies, accompanied a joint parallel report to CCPR on Israel’s failure to implement ICCPR and the range of human rights violations arising from the state party’s breach of that treaty.
In addition to HIC-HLRN, the partner organization were Addameer, Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association, Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, Jerusalem Legal Aid and Human Rights Center, Al Mezan Center for Human Rights, and the Community Action Center/Al-Quds University.
CCPR and its Covenant focuses on civil and political rights—i.e., “process rights”—that guarantee the rule of law and freedoms of movement, information, participation and association, as well as the right to a fair trial, freedom from torture and the rights of minorities. However, the HIC-HLRN joint parallel report detailed resulting violations under Israel’s spatial planning laws, the ideologically biased judicial system and resulting violations of the freedom of movement and adequate housing by procedural denials of these rights through house demolitions, denials of building permits, revocation of residency rights, denial family unification and discrimination in basic services to the depravation of the indigenous Palestinian people.
While these details constitute evidence of Israel’s “petty apartheid” practiced against Palestinian families and communities, they also point to the cumulative practice of “grand apartheid.” This policy has the purpose and effect of segregating and fragmenting the indigenous Palestinian people by constructing at least four broad legal regimes (as refugees outside Palestine, inside the Green Line, distinctly precarious status in East Jerusalem, and in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip), which force corresponding administrative and spatial separation from each other.
CCPR has recognized this grand-scale violation of the human right to adequate housing in previous reviews of Israel under ICCPR in 2010 and 2014. However, HIC-HLRN’s engagement with this legal body of the UN Human Rights System reflects and emphasizes the indivisibility of human rights and the indispensability of process rights in the exercise and realization of adequate housing. The case of Palestine also exemplifies how such violation of this right in a grand scale can deprive an entire people, including the systematic denial of its inalienable right to self-determination.
As HIC has expressed separately, this joint parallel report also highlighted Israel’s repression against Palestinian civil society, in general, but especially in the baseless and predatory designation of six leading Palestinian civil society organizations as “terrorist organizations,” including HIC Members and other human rights organizations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Download the joint statement here
See a factsheet summarizing the parallel report here
Download the full parallel report here
