The Palestinian Institute for International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at An-Najah National University, organized a specialized workshop to discuss the article entitled “Human Rights in Palestine: From Self-Determination to Governance.” , by Dr. Ihab Shalbak from the University of Sydney, Australia, The workshop was held on Wednesday, 20 August 2025, via Zoom, with the participation of undergraduate and graduate students from the Faculty of Law and Political Science at An-Najah, alongside a number of legal practitioners, and those interested in international law and human rights.

The workshop was led by Dr. Ihab Shalbak, a Palestinian scholar and Lecturer in Human Rights and Social Justice at the University of Sydney. Dr. Shalbak has held several community and governmental positions, including serving as Senior Research and Policy Advisor at the Australian Human Rights Commission. He is also the recipient of the annual Andrea Durbach Award from the Australian Journal of Human Rights (AJHR) for the article that was the focus of this discussion.

The workshop examined the central arguments of the article. While international law and human rights have provided Palestinians with tools to assert their struggle, they have also often reinforced settler-colonial structures that render Palestinians objects of governance rather than sovereign political actors. Dr. Shalbak further explained that the efforts of Palestinian human rights organizations, which sought to reframe Palestinians as rights-holders, have been met with accusations of bias and lack of seriousness, as part of delegitimization and repressive policies stemming from a “dominant geopolitical structure embedded in a normative system that either symbolically excludes Palestinians from its boundaries or incorporates them only as instruments subject to mechanisms of governance and control.”

This workshop was organized as part of the first academic course launched by the Institute on: International Justice, Courts, and Jurisprudence, offered during the summer semester of the 2024/2025 academic year, in cooperation with the Master’s Program in International Law and Human Rights at An-Najah National University. It also falls within the activities of the project of the establishment of the Palestinian Institute for International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights, funded by the European Union.