Analysts say legal battle over Balfour Declaration has little chance of success
Hundreds of thousands of Jews came to settle in Palestine at the expense of the indigenous people
APalestinian plan to sue Britain over a 1917 declaration backing a Jewish homeland in Palestine could help rally supporters, but has little chance of success, legal analysts say.
The Palestinian government last week announced that it was seeking legal action against Britain for the nearly centuryold Balfour Declaration, drawing scorn from Israel.
The 1917 declaration by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour said the British government “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”.
It was a major step towards the eventual establishment of the state of Israel.
The British had seized much of the land at the time as the Ottoman Empire was falling apart, and Palestinians say the declaration gave away their homeland and provided the impetus for mass Jewish migration.
They argue that the document led to the Nakba – or catastrophe in Arabic – in which more than 760,000 Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes in the war surrounding the creation of Israel in 1948.
Foreign Minister Riyad Al Malki, in a recent speech on behalf of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, said that as a result of a promise “hundreds of thousands of Jews from Europe and elsewhere came to settle in Palestine at the expense of our people.”
Few precedents
Asked by AFP to clarify what the claim would be and to which court it would be submitted, a spokesman for the Palestinian foreign ministry said that would soon be decided.
If seeking reparations, such a court case would be rare.
Eric Posner, law professor at the University of Chicago and author of a paper on reparations in international law, said he couldn’t think of an example of international courts being used in this manner. In most cases, he said, reparations are given by governments that wish to atone for previous acts.
In West Germany, for example, the government set a policy that Holocaust victims could claim damages, as did the US Congress for Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War.
But Britain has never apologised for the Balfour Declaration.
If the Palestinian government is set on the international courts, the first potential route would be through the United Nations legal body, the International Court of Justice, analysts say.
Palestine is not a full UN member state, though it has observer status.
UN vote a possibility
Stuart Casey-Maslen, professor of law at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, said the Palestinians could get a vote in the UN General Assembly calling on the ICJ to investigate.
But the ICJ would only be able to judge the case by the laws that existed in 1917, Casey-Maslen explained.
This is before many of the basic principles of international law were agreed upon and as such the law is “likely to be very favourable to the UK.”
The principle of the Balfour Agreement was also ratified in 1922 by the League of Nations, the forerunner to the United Nations.