[DEBATE] : John Dugard -UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Occupied Palestine-Speaks @ Wits.

[Salim Vally]

Date/Time: Thursday, 29th March, 19:00.
Venue: Senate Room, Senate House, Wits University.
Please distribute.

Chaired by Yasmin Sooka, Director, Foundation for Human Rights and
former TRC commissioner in South Africa and Seirra Leone.

Safe parking on Yale Road. Please arrive early/on time-venue likely to
be filled very quickly. 

John Dugard is a South African professor of international law. He has
served as Judge ad hoc on the International Court of Justice and as a
Special Rapporteur for both the United Nations Commission on Human
Rights and the International Law Commission. He has written extensively
on South African apartheid. From 1975-1977, Dugard was the Dean and a
Professor of Law at Wits University. From 1978-1990, Dugard was the
Director of the Centre for Applied Legal Studies.

He has held visiting professorships at different universities in the US
and in Australia. Dugard was Director of the Lauterpacht Centre for
International Law at the University of Cambridge from 1995-1997.
In 1998, he was appointed as Chair in Public International Law at Leiden
University in the Netherlands. 

In 2000, he served as Judge ad hoc in the cases concerning Armed
Activities on the Territory of the Congo (Democratic Republic of the
Congo v. Burundi) (Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Uganda) and
(Democratic Republic of the Congo v. Rwanda) at the International Court
of Justice.

Following the recurrence of the Palestinian intifada in late 2000, John
Dugard was appointed as Chairman of a UN Commission on Human Rights
inquiry  on the situation of human rights there. In 2001, he was
appointed as Special Rapporteur to the Commission and has submitted
annual reports and recommendations to the UN concerning the situation of
international human rights and humanitarian law. He now reports to the
UN Human Rights Council as Special Rapporteur on the situation of human
rights in the occupied Palestinian territories. In its first special
session in July 2006, the nascent Human Rights Council decided to
dispatch an urgent fact-finding mission headed by Dugard to report on
the situation there. On 26 September 2006, Dugard reported that the
"standards of human rights in the Palestinian territories have fallen to
intolerable new levels". In his report to the 4th session of the Human
Rights Council, Dugard states, "Discrimination against Palestinians
occurs in many fields. Moreover, the 1973 International Convention on
the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid appears to be
violated by many practices, particularly those denying freedom of
movement to Palestinians."

In a report release in February 2007, John Dugard, the U.N.'s "Special
Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian
territories occupied since 1967," announced that Israel's policies
resemble those of apartheid. "It is difficult to resist the conclusion
that many of Israel's laws and practices violate the 1966 Convention on
the Elimination of all forms of Racial Discrimination," says the report.
To access the report:
http://www.ohchr.org/english/bodies/hrcouncil/docs/4session/A.HRC.4.17.p
df