The Australian Journal of Human Rights (AJHR) has awarded the annual Andrea Durbach Prize to Dr Ihab Shalbak from the University of Sydney for his article, ‘Human rights in Palestine: from self-determination to governance’.
Drawing on a number of historical junctions, Dr Shalbak argues for a critical reassessment of the utility of international law and human rights to Palestinians in their quest for sovereignty and self-determination. In instances where Palestinians attempted to engage international law and human rights, “they repeatedly came up against a geopolitical structure of domination nested in a normative order that either relegates them figuratively outside its border or includes them only as an object of governance”.
The Andrea Durbach Prize is awarded to an author or authors whose original article in the Australian Journal of Human Rights reflects the values that have resonated in Professor Durbach’s career and scholarship. These include: the courage to push the boundaries of human rights debates; the creativity to examine issues that cut across different academic disciplines; and a desire to press for human rights accountability to ensure voices that are not always heard are magnified.
The prize jury (made up of AJHR Co-Editors in Chief Associate Professor Holly Doel-Mackaway and Dr Maree Higgins, along with Dr Sara Dehm from the Journal's Editorial Board, and Professor Thalia Anthony from the Journal’s Advisory Board) celebrated the article as a “beautifully written exposition of how the rights of Palestinians are expressed based on an excellent collection of Palestinian sources”. The prize jury commended Dr Shalbak for his “wide-ranging and brave historical analysis that undertakes a nuanced tracing of Palestinian human rights politics and varying articulations of self-determination in context of the Palestinian anti-colonial, national liberation movement”. They added: “This article is highly topical given the Israeli criminalisation of human rights work in Palestine/Israel, as well as due to the evolution of jurisprudence on self-determination in international law in recent years.”
You can read Dr Shalbak’s winning article in open access here.