Looking ahead to Adalah’s Annual Law Students’ Camp 2020

The Galilee Foundation is pleased to be supporting Adalah with their 15^th Annual law Students Camp this coming late summer

The project has three main objectives:

To bring Palestinian law students together from Israel and the West Bank, including Jerusalem, together as a group;

To introduce this group to human rights lawyering and advocacy;

To increase their knowledge of and interest in human rights law and litigation.

The curricula of the faculties of law taught at Israeli universities and colleges provide little-to-no instruction in human rights law; at Palestinian universities few courses deal with Israeli law (although it controls the population). There are few opportunities within law courses for Palestinian law students to engage in discussions on Israel’s racial discrimination of Palestinian citizens of the state through law and policy; the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip (according to Israeli law); or the application of international human rights and humanitarian law to these situations.

Palestinian law students in Israel and in the OPT also have few opportunities within formal or professional settings to meet with each other and discuss legal issues and concerns of common interest, and moreover to do so in their shared mother tongue, Arabic (Israeli law faculties only operate in Hebrew).

Adalah fills major gaps in the curricula of the law degrees offered at Israel’s universities and law colleges, and the training of Palestinian law students has been one of Adalah’s main goals since its establishment almost 25 years ago, and remains at the heart of its work.

Adalah’s very successful camp – the first of its kind to bring Palestinian law students studying at Israeli and some Palestinian universities together as a group – introduces the students to leading human rights lawyers, academics, and organizations, and the most topical legal issues facing Palestinians in Israel and the OPT. Further, Adalah has kept in touch with many of these students, some of whom have gone on to work as law student trainees and legal apprentices with Adalah and to undertake some pro bono legal work for us, and to participate in other trainings and events.

An External Evaluation team that examined Adalah’s work stated that, “Adalah is the only professional legal organization that has the integrity and authority to train law students in the field of human rights…”