Rights Group Challenges UK Ban on Pro-Palestinian Students

Date: 06 September 2021 - 22:49

News ID: ۹۴۰۵۱

LONDON (Dispatches) – A British human rights group has moved forward with a legal challenge against UK Education Minister Gavin Williamson over a letter sent in May issuing “illegal” guidance to schools about how they should handle student protests against the Zionist regime’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip.
CAGE, a rights group in London, has formally issued judicial review proceedings in the High Court challenging Williamson’s letter, which called on school leaders and staff to “act appropriately” when they express political views on the Zionist regime.
The letter also told schools that they were prohibited from engaging with organizations that reject the regime’s right to exist.
“CAGE believes that no such right exists in international law that prohibits people and groups from questioning a ‘state’s’ legitimacy,” the organization said in a news release on Friday.
CAGE, meanwhile, has said that its challenge has been supported by legal experts, including international law jurist Professor John Dugard and Professor Avi Shlaim, an emeritus fellow at Oxford University.
In CAGE’s statement, Dugard said that Williamson’s attempt to exclude debate over the occupying regime’s so-called “right to exist” from school settings represents “a serious violation of academic freedom and freedom of expression”.
In another development, an Israeli defender of Palestinian rights who was forced to flee to the United Kingdom after being tortured by Zionist regime authorities has seen his asylum claim refused, a London-based NGO says.
The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC), an NGO campaigning for justice for all peoples, said the UK Home Office refused the asylum claim of the Jewish rabbinical student from the occupied territories “who vocally supports the struggle for Palestinian rights, and strongly opposes Zionism and Israeli apartheid on religious and political grounds”.