Britain Palestine Project

Are our current legal systems fit to provide justice for Palestine?

“The geopolitical space that we are now in is very unstable, and I think Gaza has really opened people’s eyes to how fragile the current system is”.

Join Lara Bird-Leakey from The Britain Palestine Project talk to Mira Naseer, a Legal Officer for the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) who is currently working on the new Global 195 initiative.

The Global 195 is a worldwide legal coalition dedicated to holding accountable Israeli and dual national individuals alleged to have committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.

Throughout the episode, Lara and Mira discuss the relationship between the ICJ Provisional Measures and domestic accountability mechanisms, how the UK has interpreted its obligations under the Genocide Convention, and how states' in the Global South are rising up together to uphold international law for Palestine.

Are our current legal systems fit to provide justice for Palestine?

Join Lara Bird-Leakey and The Britain Palestine Project in our new podcast series to try to answer the question of whether international law is in crisis.

Bringing you a new guest every episode, Lara will be speaking to those at the forefront of legal practice who are pursuing accountability for violations of international law. International Law in Crisis will analyse functions and mechanisms within the international legal system, as well as developments in Palestine and Israel, to discuss the role of the UK and the international community in upholding human rights and ending impunity for those who commit grave breaches of international law.

With new podcasts every month, and weekly articles covering a range of different legal topics, search International Law in Crisis on Spotify, and make sure to click follow so that you don't miss a single episode.

Follow The Britain Palestine Project on Substack to stay up to date with the article series.

Tickets for the Britain Palestine Project's annual conference on the 8th May this year, 'The Rule of Law: the route to a better future for Palestinians and Israelis' are on sale now, so check out the link to our website below for tickets and more information.

with Tom Swarbrick, 5pm Thursday 20 March 2025

20th February 2025Dr. Lex Takkenberg will spell out the basic facts about the Agency’s mandate, history and work on behalf of Palestinian refugees. A Dutch National, he is Senior Advisor on the Question of Palestine at ARDD, Arab Renaissance for Democracy and Development, in Amman. From 1989 until 2019, he worked in various field and headquarters positions with UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, most recently at its Amman headquarters as the agency’s first Chief Ethics Officer. He was previously UNRWA’s General Counsel, Director of Operations, and (Deputy) Field Director in Gaza and Syria. Before joining UNRWA, he was the Legal Officer of the Dutch Refugee Council, from 1983 until 1989. A law graduate from the University of Amsterdam, where he also worked as an Academic Assistant from 1987-1989, he obtained a Doctorate in International Law from the University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands, in 1997 after having successfully defended his doctoral dissertation entitled The Status of Palestinian Refugees in International Law. Oxford University Press (OUP) published a commercial edition of the dissertation in 1998; an integral Arabic translation was published by the Institute for Palestine Studies in 2003. A new version of the book – co-authored with Francesca Albanese – was published, also with OUP, in 2020.

Miranda’s mother was a secular Jewish refugee from the Holocaust in 1938. She was always bitterly opposed to what was being done to the Palestinians in her name as a Jew. Because of that, Miranda became an Ecumenical Accompanier in 2009, spent 3 months in Hebron, and has been back many times since. She is a member of the Holocaust survivor Descendants Network and attends demonstrations under that banner. In 2017 she produced a documentary entitled ‘Balfour to Banksy: Divisions and Visions in Palestine‘. She is a trustee of Sabeel-Kairos UK, the Communications Lead for Liberal Democrat Friends of Palestine as well as being on the Advisory Forum of the Balfour Project and a founder member of CAMPAIN.

Thair Abu Ras is a PhD candidate at the department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland. A Palestinian citizen of Israel, Thair has extensive experience in civil society in Israel. Thair worked for Mossawa – The advocacy centre for Arab citizens in Israel’, “Sikkuy-Aufoq: a shared Jewish and Arab nonprofit organisation that works to advance equality and partnership between the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel”, and the European Union delegation to Israel working on employment equality for Palestinian citizens in Israel. Thair has a Masters in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Haifa and a Masters from the University of Houston in Political Science, his current research focuses on the Palestinian citizens of Israel during the Israeli political crisis 2019-2022.   

Online talk given

Jonathan Kuttab is a co-founder of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq and co-founder of Nonviolence International. A well-known international human rights lawyer, Jonathan practices in the US, Palestine and Israel. He serves on the Board of Bethlehem Bible College and is President of the Board of Holy Land Trust. Jonathan was the head of the Legal Committee negotiating the Cairo Agreement of 1994 between Israel and the PLO. After graduating with his Doctor of Jurisprudence (JD) from Virginia Law School, and practising a couple years on Wall Street, Jonathan returned home to Palestine. Jonathan was visiting scholar at Osgoode Law School at York University in Toronto in the Fall of 2017, and is a founding director of Just Peace Advocates Mouvement pour une Paix Juste, a Canadian based international law human rights not-for-profit organisation. Jonathan is currently the executive director of Friends of Sabeel North America (FOSNA). Jonathan is a resident of East Jerusalem, and is a partner of Kuttab, Khoury and Hanna Law Firm in East Jerusalem.

Helena Cobban is a writer and researcher on international affairs who lives in Washington DC. In 1984, Cambridge U.P. published her seminal study The Palestinian Liberation Organisation. Three of her six other sole-authored books dealt with political and strategic developments in the Arab-Israeli theatre, the rest with more global matters. For 17 years she contributed a regular column on global issues to The Christian Science Monitor and Al-Hayat (London). In 2010 she founded Just World Books, which has published ground-breaking titles by Palestinian, Zionism-questioning Jewish, and other authors; and in 2016 she was a co-founder of Just World Educational, which she now serves as president. Her most recent book, co-authored with Rami G. Khouri, is Understanding Hamas And Why That Matters (OR Books, 2024.)

Sir Vincent Fean on Times Radio on 8 October 2024

Tamara El-Halawani is a research assistant at the SOAS ICOP project and a recent MSc graduate in International Politics from SOAS University, London. She is currently completing a dissertation on ‘The Erasure of Palestinians on social media.’ Prior to joining ICOP, she worked as a reporter for The Conduit in London and served as a parliamentary staffer for her local constituency in the House of Commons. Tamara also holds a BSc (Hons) in Molecular Genetics from the University of Edinburgh.

Dr Zahira Jaser is an Italian-Palestinian Associate Professor at the University of Sussex Business School. She is the Director of the MBA programme. She has been researching the impact of anti-Palestinian racism in organisations and society. Her research and writings have been featured in Science, the Financial Times, The Guardian, the BBC, Wired, the Harvard Business Review and many academic journals. She holds a PhD in Management from Bayes Business School (formerly Cass) and a MSc in Organisational Behaviour from the London School of Economics, and received her BA with honours in Political Science and Economics from Università Di Padova, Italy.