Civil Society Perspectives on Children’s Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

Paul Chaney

doi:10.1163/15718182-30010003

Abstract

Abstract “This study analyses civil society organisations’ (cso s’) discourse on children’s rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (opt). This is a troubled context, for Israel – the ‘State Party’ to the United Nation’s Convention on the Rights of the Child (crc), disputes that its obligations extend to the opt. In consequence, there has been a dearth of official data and scholarly attention to the situation. Discourse analysis of cso s’ reports to the UN’s monitoring mechanism, the Universal Periodic Review (upr), shows children are affected by a raft of violations including: sexual abuse, violence and inadequate access to health and education. The Israeli state’s engagement with the upr, whilst denying responsibility for the opt, raises questions about legitimation and performativity. The pathologies are compounded by state repression of civil society meaning that the upr is a singular means of highlighting children’s rights abuses in the Occupied Territories.

Highlights

Against the backdrop of international criticism and a declining human rights ranking, this study explores civil society organisations’ discourse on children’s rights in Gaza and the West bank, collectively the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Existing studies of children’s rights in the opt provide valuable insights, inter alia, spanning: the social construction of childhood rights in the West Bank (Awan, 2018), rights-based approaches to children’s national identity (Habashi, 2008), youth politicisation (Habashi, 2015), normative representations of childhood, everyday practice and resistance (Marshall, 2016), and the role of the United Nations, international agencies and civil society actors in addressing threats to Palestinian children arising from Israeli occupation (Pitner, 2000; Hart and Lo Forte, 2013; Shalhoub-Kevorkian, 2018, 2020)
The “situated knowledge” of cso s working in the opt presents a troubling picture

Summary

Introduction

Against the backdrop of international criticism and a declining human rights ranking, this study explores civil society organisations’ discourse on children’s rights in Gaza and the West bank (including East Jerusalem), collectively the Occupied Palestinian Territories (opt). Further to a raft of earlier studies revealing the suffering of the Palestinian people (e.g., Barber et al, 2017), the following analysis focuses on the upr in order to understand civil society’s conceptualisation of children’s rights in the opt and its views on crc implementation As noted, it uses discourse analysis of the corpus of cso submissions. Whilst civil society upr submissions have been used elsewhere in international studies of UN treaty implementation (Chaney, 2020a, b ), they have largely been overlooked in the context of the opt In conceptual terms they provide ‘situated knowledge’ about the prevailing rights environment from those working in and representing the affected communities (Stoetzler and Yuval-Davis, 2002). It codifies counterterrorism measures that impact on the freedom of cso s, including administrative detention, expropriation of money and property, travel bans and computer surveillance

Methodology

A Critical Assessment of Israel’s Response to the upr

Findings

Conclusion