International lawyer cites clause
Is UNRWA protecting Europe from Gaza refugees?
February 7, 2024, 2:04 a.m
The millions transferred from Europe to the UN Palestinian Relief Agency are keeping people in Gaza despite the war. The international lawyer Hartwig refers to an exclusion clause in the Geneva Refugee Convention. If the funds are not available because of the terror allegations, the situation will change, he says.
According to international law experts, the UN Palestinian relief agency UNRWA, which has come under suspicion of terrorism, is the reason why the Geneva Refugee Convention does not apply to Palestinian refugees. The Heidelberg international law expert Matthias Hartwig told the “Rheinische Post” that this was related to an exclusion clause in Article 1D of the convention. It concerns people who fled Israel in 1948 or from areas occupied by Israel in 1967, as well as their descendants who remain in the Middle East.
“It was certainly the purpose of this clause that these people could not move from there like other refugees,” Hartwig suspected to the newspaper. But that will change the moment “UNRWA protection ends, for whatever reason.” The international lawyer explained: “If UNRWA no longer has any funds and can therefore no longer fulfill its tasks, as I understand it, this means that the people concerned will benefit from the Geneva Refugee Convention.” This means that Palestinian refugees can then make use of the opportunity to apply for asylum as refugees as soon as they have entered an EU country.
Emeritus professor of international refugee law and former UN advisor Guy Goodwin-Gill sees it similarly: “The so-called exclusion clause is in reality a conditional inclusion clause,” he said, according to the report. Article 1D of the Geneva Refugee Convention literally states: “This Convention shall not apply to any person currently enjoying the protection or assistance of any organization or body of the United Nations (…).”
UNRWA is responsible for six million refugees
The number of refugees who are entitled to the aid organization’s services has increased from around 700,000 to almost six million since it was founded 75 years ago. According to the report, the statistics from the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF) recently showed a low recognition rate: for people from the Palestinian territories who sought protection in Germany, for example, it was 11.5 percent, writes the “Rheinische Post”.
The international lawyer Hartwig, who works at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law, points to an EU qualifications directive as evidence for his assessment, “which expressly refers to the Geneva Refugee Convention and states that certain people, namely those who are protected by UNRWA and cannot claim protection in Europe. However, it is still controversial whether the European states, with their decades-long financial transfers to UNRWA, are explicitly aiming to exclude asylum for Palestinians. The European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and many national courts rejected the binding nature of the exclusion article in their asylum jurisprudence and granted protection anyway, the paper writes.
Following allegations against the UN Palestinian Relief Agency that around a dozen of its employees were involved in the Hamas attack on Israel, the organization expects a preliminary report by the beginning of March. This was said by the UNRWA representative in Lebanon, Dorothee Klaus. UNRWA expects that countries that suspended funding after the allegations emerged will review their decisions based on the investigation. The USA and Germany, among others, recently suspended their regular funding for UNRWA. Israel has already called for the UN organization to be dissolved. It is an obstacle to a peace solution in the Middle East.