Al-Haq

Al-Haq’s own site title states its age: “Al-Haq | Defending Human rights in Palestine since 1979” — the lower-case r is the site’s, and the line is a title tag rather than anything printed on the page. Nearly half a century of continuous documentation from Ramallah makes it the backbone of much of what is known in evidentiary terms about conditions in the West Bank. Its stated mission is to promote and defend Palestinian human rights, strengthen the rule of law, and “fight impunity through holding perpetrators of violations of these laws accountable irrespective of their nationality” — the last clause being the organisation’s long-standing insistence that its remit includes violations by Palestinian authorities.

The site’s architecture is the finding aid. Documentation is split into From the Field (incident-level accounts gathered by field researchers), fieldwork reports, monthly reports and annual reports; Advocacy is organised by forum, with separate strands for the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, corporate accountability, universal jurisdiction, third-party state obligations, the European Union and the United Nations; Publications and Library hold the longer legal studies. For a researcher building a legal argument, entering by forum rather than by date is far faster than searching.

The newest and least expected component is the Forensic Architecture Investigations unit, which applies spatial analysis and open-source reconstruction to individual incidents and mounts the results as exhibitions and evidentiary submissions. It represents a real methodological shift in Palestinian human rights work: from affidavit collection towards reconstruction that can be tested in a courtroom or a parliamentary inquiry.

Two things to hold in view. Al-Haq’s standing is long-established, and it is Al-Haq’s own record that says so: its twenty-five-year retrospective lists the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize (1989) among the awards that had made the organisation internationally known “for the strength of its work, accuracy of documentation, and legal approach” by the early 1990s, and the organisation’s note on Jimmy Carter’s death recalls that “President Carter came to Jerusalem in 1990 to present Carter-Menil Human Rights Award to Al-Haq and B’tselem” — the Palestinian and the Israeli documentation project of the same occupation, honoured together in their first decade. And it is an organisation that has had to defend its own existence: its advocacy navigation carries permanent strands for Human Rights Defenders and for the “StandWithThe6” campaign, which is what an archive looks like when the archivists are themselves the subject of proceedings. Researchers should also note that the site is a JavaScript application whose section landing pages sometimes render empty on first load; if a page appears blank, reload it or enter through a deeper link.

Sources

• Al-Haq — home
• Vision, Mission and Goals — Al-Haq
• Waiting for Justice — Al-Haq: 25 Years Defending Human Rights (1979–2004), Al-Haq (PDF) — the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize (1989) among its awards
• Al-Haq Mourns the Passing of Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter — Al-Haq, on the 1990 presentation in Jerusalem to Al-Haq and B’Tselem