Parliamentary Briefing: Settlement trade and the law

1 - 2 Mar 2017

All Welcome

Limited seating will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.
Please leave at least 20 minutes to clear security

 

When: 20 November, 6:30pm

Where: Committee Room 5, House of Commons, via St. Stephen’s Entrance.
(Click here for map)

Speakers:

Professor James Crawford SC, FBA - International Lawyer at Cambridge University. Professor Crawford has written the first formal opinion on the legality of European trade with the settler economy.He was responsible for the United Nations International Law Commission’s work on the International Criminal Court (1994) and for the second reading of the ILC Articles on State Responsibility (2001). He has appeared in more than 40 cases before the International Court of Justice and other international tribunals, and is engaged as expert, counsel and arbitrator in international arbitration. In 2012, he was awarded the Hudson Medal by the American Society of International Law.

Daniel Levy - Director, Middle East and North Africa Programme at European Council on Foreign Relations. He is also Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation and Senior Fellow at The Century Foundation. During the Ehud Barak Government of 1999-2001, Mr. Levy worked in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office as special adviser and head of Jerusalem Affairs, following which Mr. Levy worked as senior policy adviser to then Israeli Minister of Justice, Yossi Beilin.

Suzanne Ismail - Peace and Social Witness Programme Manager, the Quakers. As a signatory to the Trading Away Peace report launched last month (see below) Suzanne will be speaking to the content of the report and the reasoning behind it. She works jointly for Ecumenical Council for Corporate Responsibility (ECCR) as a researcher, responsible for writing ECCR’s reports on companies, sectors and issues and involved in dialogue with companies and institutional investors.

Chair:

Andy Slaughter MP, Shadow Justice Minister and Vice-Chair of Labour Friends of Palestine (LFPME).

 

Trading Away Peace

 

Last month, 22 European NGOs called for a total ban on trade with Israel’s settlement programme in the occupied Palestinian territory. The report; “Trading Away Peace: How Europe helps sustain Israel’s illegal settlement programme” illustrated, for the first time, how Europe imports fifteen times more from the settler economy than it does from Palestinians.

The recommendations in the report drew heavily on the work of international lawyer Professor James Crawford, whose 60 page formal opinion notes that:

"there do not appear to be any EC laws which could be breached by a member state taking the decision to ban the import of settlement produce on public policy grounds."

 

Professor Crawford will explain his work on this issue while Daniel Levy and Suzanne Ismail with speak to the political issues around such a shift in European policy towards Israel’s settlement programme.

For more information please contact:

Seph Brown
Events and Membership Officer
[email protected]
0207 832 1325