Legal Solidarity: International Law against Discrimination?

Legal Solidarity: International Law against Discrimination and Occupation.
A talk with Hassan Jabareen and Esra Demir Gürsel
Moderation: Cengiz Barskanmaz

Activists, movements and legal scholars around the world have long tried to make good on the promises of international law to confront state-sanctioned discrimination, occupation and war crimes. Nowadays, perhaps more than ever, the institutions designed and put in place to implement and protect International human rights and humanitarian law appear fundamentally impotent in face of ongoing violations of human rights.

This talk seeks to reevaluate the effectiveness of international law in the protection of human rights, focusing on the various legal struggles of Palestinians in Israel and in the occupied territories, as well as on strategies of the Kurdish movement to end oppression and war crimes. The following questions will be addressed: what role do local and international legal institutions play for Palestinian and Kurdish human rights struggles? Is law essential for social change or is it in fact, even complicit in legitimizing the courts and other state institutions?

Also taking contemporary Germany into account, our talk intends to open a practical discussion of the possibilities of using applicable legal tools in international solidarity movements. Finally it aims to examine to what extent anti-racist and anti-militarist activism in Germany can learn from the legal experiences of human rights activists in Israel/Palestine and Turkey/Kurdistan.

Hassan Jabareen is a Palestinian human rights lawyer and the founder and General Director of Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel. Hassan has extensive experience in litigating landmark constitutional law cases before the Israeli Supreme Court. His cases deal with equal citizenship rights of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well as the applicability of international humanitarian law to defend the rights of Palestinians living under occupation. Hassan was a research fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2015-2016.

Esra Demir Gürsel is a visiting scholar at the HU Berlin. She has worked as a legal scholar on public law and human rights law in Turkey for the last 10 years. Her current research project examines to what extent the European Court of Human Rights has provided sufficient and effective protection in cases of large-scale violations, with a particular focus on the Kurdish cases against Turkey.

Cengiz Barskanmaz is a lecturer of public law at the HU Berlin as well an adjunct faculty member at the DePaul University Chicago. He is also member of MAFDAD, a non-profit organization based in Germany with the aim of advancing human rights for the Kurds.

The event will take place in English.
venue: Humboldt University – Legal faculty, room 213

With the kind support of the Workgroup of critical Jurists at the Humboldt University (akj)