Palestine: New ARIJ Human Rights & Environment Report

The Applied Research Institute – Jerusalem (ARIJ) has issued a new report on The Status of the Environment in the oPt – A Human Rights Based Approach, 2011 (SOER 2011). Produced with the support of the NGO Development Center (NDC) and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), this Profile provides a narrative, statistical and cartographic description of the current environmental status of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). The analysis relates the environmental and human rights conditions within the framework of existing international treaties and other instruments that establish the rights to a healthy environment. 

Therefore, the report considers the corresponding obligations of state—in this case, Israel—for the impact of human rights violations arising from its degradation of the environment in the occupied West Bank, Jerusalem and Gaza Strip.

The ARIJ report also presents the major trends and changes in the environmental and socioeconomic indicators over the period 2007–10. The legal and institutional aspects of the Palestinian environmentally related sectors are presented and analyzed in the report, which concludes with a list of recommendations to guide monitoring and control further environmental degradation, as well as laying out what is needed to ensure reparation to the land and people affected by the cited violations.

See a summary of the report.