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Press releases Special Procedures
ISRAEL’S 55-YEAR OCCUPATION OF PALESTINIAN TERRITORY IS APARTHEID – UN HUMAN
RIGHTS EXPERT
25 March 2022
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the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, and Israel
GENEVA (25 March 2022) – A UN expert called today on the international community
to accept and adopt the findings in his current report, echoing recent findings
by Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organisations, that
apartheid is being practiced by Israel in the occupied Palestinian territory.
“There is today in the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel since 1967 a
deeply discriminatory dual legal and political system that privileges the
700,000 Israeli Jewish settlers living in the 300 illegal Israeli settlements in
East Jerusalem and the West Bank,” said Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur
for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since
1967.
“Living in the same geographic space, but separated by walls, checkpoints, roads
and an entrenched military presence, are more than three million Palestinians,
who are without rights, living under an oppressive rule of institutional
discrimination and without a path to a genuine Palestinian state that the world
has long promised is their right.
“Another two million Palestinians live in Gaza, described regularly as an
‘open-air prison’, without adequate access to power, water or health, with a
collapsing economy and with no ability to freely travel to the rest of Palestine
or the outside world.”
The Special Rapporteur said that a political regime which so intentionally and
clearly prioritizes fundamental political, legal and social rights to one group
over another within the same geographic unit on the basis of one’s
racial-national-ethnic identity satisfies the international legal definition of
apartheid.
“Apartheid is not, sadly, a phenomenon confined to the history books on southern
Africa,” he said in his report to the Human Rights Council. “The 1998 Rome
Statute of the International Criminal Court came into law after the collapse of
the old South Africa. It is a forward-looking legal instrument which prohibits
apartheid as a crime against humanity today and into the future, wherever it may
exist.”
Lynk said that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory has
been deliberately built with the intention of enduring facts on the ground –
primarily through settlements and barricades – to demographically engineer a
permanent, and illegal, Israeli sovereign claim over occupied territory, while
confining Palestinians in smaller and more confined reserves of disconnected
land.
This has been accomplished in part through a long-standing series of inhuman(e)
acts by the Israeli military towards the Palestinians that have been integral to
the occupation, he said. He pointed to arbitrary and extra-judicial killings,
torture, the denial of fundamental rights, an abysmal rate of child deaths,
collective punishment, an abusive military court system, periods of intensive
Israeli military violence in Gaza and home demolitions.
Lynk said a number of recent reports and opinions issued by respected
Palestinian, Israeli and international human rights organizations have come to
the same conclusion on the practice of apartheid by Israel. He added that
leading international personalities – including former UN Secretary General Ban
Ki-Moon, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, South African Foreign Minister Naledi Pandor
and former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair – have also all called this
apartheid.
The Special Rapporteur said the international community bears much
responsibility for this present state of affairs. “For more than 40 years, the
UN Security Council and General Assembly have stated in hundreds of resolutions
that Israel’s annexation of occupied territory is unlawful, its construction of
hundreds of Jewish settlements are illegal, and its denial of Palestinian
self-determination breaches international law,” he said.
“The Council and the Assembly have repeatedly criticized Israel for defying
their resolutions. They have threatened consequences. But no accountability has
ever followed. If the international community had truly acted on its resolutions
40 or 30 years ago, we would not be talking about apartheid today.”
To end the practice of apartheid in the occupied Palestinian territory, the
Special Rapporteur called on the international community to assemble an
imaginative and vigorous menu of accountability measures to bring the Israeli
occupation and its apartheid practices in the occupied Palestinian territory to
a complete end.
ENDS
Mr. S. Michael Lynk is the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights
in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967
The Special Rapporteurs, Independent Experts and Working Groups are part of what
is known as the Special Procedures of the Human Rights Council. Special
Procedures, the largest body of independent experts in the UN Human Rights
system, is the general name of the Council’s independent fact-finding and
monitoring mechanisms that address either specific country situations or
thematic issues in all parts of the world. Special Procedures’ experts work on a
voluntary basis; they are not UN staff and do not receive a salary for their
work. They are independent from any government or organization and serve in
their individual capacity.
UN Human Rights, Country Page – Israel and occupied Palestinian territory
For more information and media requests, please contact Sarah Nobel
(sarah.jacquiernobel@un.org)
For media inquiries related to other UN independent experts, please contact
Jeremy Laurence (+ 41 79 444 7578 / jeremy.laurence@un.org)
Follow news related to the UN’s independent human rights experts on
Twitter @UN_SPExperts.
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