On 29 September 2025, Al-Haq and Al-Quds Community Action Centre sent a joint submission in response to a call for input from civil society organisations issued by the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

The call for input concerned the implementation of recommendations contained in the report of the ad hoc Conciliation Commission (CERD/C/113/3) dated 21 August 2024 in the case State of Palestine v. Israel, and specifically the report’s recommendations concerning ‘a joint platform with Israeli and Palestinian human rights defenders to address questions of racial discrimination and hate speech in both communities’ and the promotion of ‘common activities towards peace and reconciliation within the territories of both State parties and in the diaspora.’

Before responding to the particular request, the joint submission emphasised that the CERD Committee must urgently address the context in which the inter-State communication arose. This relates to the conditions that have led to the current existential threat faced by the Palestinian people through Israel’s genocidal campaign in Gaza, and wider policies and practices of apartheid on both sides of the Green Line, and throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).

The joint submission calls on the Committee to ensure that its process of follow-up is focused on the prevention of genocide and that the Committee should use the Early Warning / Urgent Action mechanism to immediately call for a full embargo on all military assistance to Israel by all States Parties.

The Joint Submission notes that it has been a year of escalating genocidal violence since the CERD Commission’s report in Palestine v Israel stated in its findings and recommendations that Israel’s conduct ‘may amount to a situation of apartheid if no action is taken by Israel to effectively address the issues raised.’ We ask the Committee when it is going to declare Israel’s conduct on both sides of the Green Line as constituting apartheid?

The Joint Submission requests that the Committee use the Early Warning / Urgent Action mechanism to set out:

(i) a legal understanding of apartheid as State responsibility and a State wrong, modelled on the definition in the Apartheid Convention;

(ii) acknowledge the range of UN sources, as well as NGO and civil society reports, that consider the situation as apartheid on both sides of the Green Line;

(iii) consult with and consider the views of South Africa and Namibia, whose populations’ fight to end apartheid were central to the adoption of ICERD and the work of the Committee in its first decades;

(iv) set out the legal obligations of Israel to prevent, prohibit and eradicate its policies and practices of apartheid;

(v) set out the legal obligations of all States Parties to ICERD to ‘particularly condemn’ apartheid as required by Article 3.

Al-Haq and CAC recognise that the Articles 11-13 inter-State communications mechanism and Commission report in The State of Palestine v Israel combines aspects of conciliation with the need to uphold the standards of the Convention. We consider that all action taken under ICERD must be with the goal of preventing genocide; ending Israel’s settler colonial apartheid regime; and ending the illegal occupation, annexation and colonisation through settlements. We note that the situations of genocide and apartheid flow from the illegal occupation, annexation and colonisation of Palestinian territory. CERD must urgently consider how its mechanisms are best used to achieve these goals, without which no efforts at conciliation can succeed.

Al-Haq and CAC bring to the Committee’s attention that on 19 October 2021, in an attack of unprecedented repression against Palestinian human rights civil society organisations, Israel’s then Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz issued a decision designating six leading Palestinian civil society organisations, including Al-Haq, as “terror organisations.” On 4 September 2025 following continued lobbying by Israel, the United States placed Al-Haq, Al Mezan and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights on the United States sanctions list on account of their legal work supporting the International Criminal Court, work which includes Al- Haq’s communications on the crime of apartheid.

Such actions by Israel, actions which clearly meets the conduct included at Article 2(f) of the Convention Against Apartheid i.e., Persecution of organizations and persons, by depriving them of fundamental rights and freedoms, because they oppose apartheid, must be condemned by the Committee as Israeli state action aimed at precluding the capacity for Palestinian or Israeli human rights defenders to make freely informed choices in determining whether or how to establish joint platforms or to consider undertaking common activities.

The full joint submission is available here.