ILA Seminar Series - The United Nations and the Question of Palestine

ILA Seminar Series - The United Nations and the Question of Palestine

Speaker: Dr Ardi Imseis, Associate Professor of Law, Queen’s University

Discussant: Dr Victor Kattan, Assistant Professor in Public International Law, University of Nottingham

As part of the ILA Seminar Series, on Thursday 21 November 2024,  Dr Imseis presented his recent book, the first sustained and scholarly legal history of the United Nation’s management of the Palestine question.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, there has been a continuing though vacillating gulf between the requirements of international law and the UN on the question of Palestine. This book explores the UN's management of the longest-running problem on its agenda, critically assessing tensions between the organization's position and international law. What forms has the UN's failure to respect international law taken, and with what implications? The author critically interrogates the received wisdom regarding the UN's fealty to the international rule of law, in favour of what is described as an international rule by law. This book demonstrates that through the actions of the UN, Palestine and its people have been committed to a state of what the author calls 'international legal subalternity', according to which the promise of justice through international law is repeatedly proffered under a cloak of political legitimacy furnished by the international community, but its realisation is interminably withheld.

Watch the recording of this exciting seminar here.