Two Human Rights Watch (HRW) employees who make up the organization’s entire Israel and Palestine team are stepping down from their positions after leadership blocked a report that deems Israel’s denial of Palestinian refugees the right of return a “crime against humanity”.
In separate resignation letters obtained by Jewish Currents and the Guardian, Omar Shakir, who has headed the team for nearly the last decade, and Milena Ansari, the team’s assistant researcher, said leadership’s decision to pull the report broke from HRW’s customary approval processes and was evidence that the organization was putting fear of political backlash over a commitment to international law.
“I have lost my faith in the integrity of how we do our work and our commitment to principled reporting on the facts and application of the law,” Shakir wrote in his resignation letter. “As such, I am no longer able to represent or work for Human Rights Watch.” The resignations have roiled one of the most prominent human rights groups in the world just as HRW’s new executive director, Philippe Bolopion, begins his tenure.
The perspective of coining the denying of the right to return of refugees as a crime against humanity is interesting, a good argument that can and should be pushed. But if it’s presented as a legal fact rather than a good theory that should be tested, like the news articles say, I would have blocked that report myself and forced the authors to correct it. It’s a report, it can absolutely be critical about the law and it’s interpretation as of today, and advocate for an evolution of it through a meaningfull legal argument, but it shouldn’t present audacious legal theories as totally grounded legal rules ; that’s a job for the legal action team, not the Independent experts, and I understand how the NGO’s credibility could be at stakes here.
I’d like to have the report to really make my own mind on it.
Kind of hard to do that when they’ve withheld the report.
Sounds to me like you don’t trust anything or anyone and that’s a sad way to live.
that was a really shitty and weird personnal attack, congratulation.
Also, the authors were asked many time to correct their work, they had month to do so and refused. The report is not officially released, but accessible to some, as the journalists did actually read it. I’ll try to find it. I bet the authors will make it go public in some way if it’s not done already.