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How would you summarize your career as a human rights activist?
When I came from London in 1976, the occupation had already been in place for nine years. Working in my father's law office enabled me to review changes in the law that the Israeli authorities were making and I realized that there was a very big discrepancy between what was said about the occupation and its benevolent nature, and the actual reality. It became clear to me that these changes were neither haphazard nor arbitrary. At the same time, I realized that the court system was in disarray and that no one was paying attention to these aspects.
My father and I were of the opinion that the solution for the Palestine-Israel conflict was to establish a Palestinian state alongside Israel, and my view was that we, the Palestinians, have to work on establishing that state; nobody's going to do it for us. And I thought that much had to be done to establish the important principle of the rule of law, so that when we achieve our aim of a Palestinian state it would be respectful of that principle. So I have believed since then that what was needed was not just to document the legal changes and the human rights violations, but to try and do something to alleviate those violations and to work on advancing the principle of the rule of law.
The first joint publication of Al-Haq (which was then known as Law in Service of Man) and the International Commission of Jurists, entitled The West Bank and the Rule of Law, revealed how the military orders were not being published and the great impact this had on the local law relating to various aspects of life for the Palestinians living in the occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). At that time, the relationship between Al-Haq and the officers in the legal departments of the Israeli military government was what one can describe as 'polite'. Rather than ban the book or arrest its authors and close down Al-Haq, Israel responded by publishing a full-length book that denied the claims of human rights violations and violations of the law of occupation set forth in our publication.