PALESTINIANS TO RAISE REFUGEE ‘RIGHT OF RETURN’ AT FIRST UN RACISM REVIEW
The PA’s human rights record will be reviewed for the first time by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination
The Palestinian Authority is expected to raise the issue of the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees at its first United Nations racism review in Geneva next month.
The PA’s human rights record will be reviewed for the first time by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD), which will also look at discrimination issues in the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Iceland, Mexico, Mongolia and Poland.
In a report the PA submitted to CERD in 2018, in advance of the meeting, it spoke about the importance of the “right of return” for Palestinians to sovereign Israel, noting such a demand was in line with the convention on the elimination of racism, to which both it and Israel were signatories.
It noted that the committee in the past had said that “refugees and displaced persons have the right freely to return to their homes of origin under conditions of safety.” The PA continued that according to CERD, refugees have the “right to have restored to them property of which they were deprived in the course of the conflict, and to be compensated appropriately for any such property that cannot be returned to them.”
Until 2012, the UN did not view Palestine as a state and therefore there was no mechanism by which to review the Palestinian Authority’s record on human rights.
