ANALYSIS: By Treasa Dunworth

As Newsroom has reported, 15 aid agencies have joined forces to call on the Aotearoa New Zealand government to do more to encourage an immediate and sustainable ceasefire in Gaza, in the wake of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) decision.

Those 15 agencies are joining an international and increasingly loud chorus of calls for an immediate ceasefire.

I would go further, and remind the government that whatever it thinks of last month’s ICJ ruling, New Zealand has a number of international legal obligations to inform its response to Israel’s military attack on Gaza.

As most international commentary has highlighted, even fixated on, the ICJ did not order a ceasefire as South Africa requested. But the fact that it didn’t is a manifestation of how constrained the court was.

Despite its lofty title, the ICJ (sometimes referred to as the “World Court”) isn’t a “world” court in any meaningful sense of the word. It only has jurisdiction to consider issues in cases where countries have explicitly agreed to the court’s authority over them.

In this current litigation, the court was able to consider the case only on the basis that both South Africa and Israel are States Parties to the Genocide Convention. That meant South Africa had to frame its application through a “genocide lens”, and that the court had no power to go beyond the obligations arising out of that treaty. This jurisdictional conundrum partly explains why the court did not order a ceasefire — it didn’t have the authority to do so.

It also partly explains why the court could not order Hamas to release the remaining Israeli hostages. Hamas was not a party to the proceedings (the court can only hear proceedings on disputes between states), and despite the claim by Israel in its oral pleadings, the hostage taking by Hamas and their subsequent mistreatment and killing didn’t “plausibly”, according to the court, meet the threshold of genocide.

But the court did order Israel to take all measures in its power to prevent genocide, and ordered Israel to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions faced by Palestinians in Gaza.

Orders fall within ‘genocide jurisdiction’
These orders fall within the “genocide jurisdiction” because the treaty defines genocide as not only direct killing, but also “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part”.

An immediate ceasefire would go a long way toward Israel complying with these orders so the calls for a ceasefire are well made, despite the court not having the power to order one.

What is New Zealand’s role in all this? What are the moral and legal responsibilities it has and should fulfil?

In its decision, the court (re)confirmed that all states parties to the Genocide Convention have a “common interest” in ensuring the prevention, suppression, and punishment of genocide. That includes New Zealand, which has a legal obligation to do what it can to ensure that Israel complies with the court’s orders.

This is not a question of New Zealand’s choice of foreign policy, but a legal obligation.

The second relevant international obligation for New Zealand arises from international humanitarian law (IHL) — the body of law which governs the conduct of war, and which includes prohibitions against the direct targeting of civilians, causing superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering, the taking of hostages, the use of “human shields” and engaging in indiscriminate attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure.

These rules don’t just apply to the parties directly involved in any given conflict — in this instance, Israel and Hamas. The relevant treaties stipulate all states have a shared responsibility “to ensure respect” for these rules. That responsibility exists independently of the lack of ICJ jurisdiction to consider these matters.

Must act in good faith
There is a third legal obligation for New Zealand in the wake of these orders.  Although decisions of the court are only binding as between the parties to a case (here South Africa and Israel), as a member of the United Nations, New Zealand has a legal obligation to act in good faith towards the court, being one of the organs of the UN and its principal legal body.

This obligation aligns with New Zealand’s self-professed commitment to the international rule of law.

Thus, regardless of political preferences and whether the current government agrees or disagrees with the court’s findings, the findings have been made and New Zealand ought not undermine the court or the international rule of law.

Governments of all political persuasions repeatedly pronounce that a small nation such as ours depends on the international rule of law and a rules-based international order.

Now is the time for New Zealand to step up and defend that order, even if it feels uncomfortable, even if it annoys some of our “friends” (such as the US). We are legally obliged to step up and speak out.

Dr Treasa Dunworth is an associate professor, Faculty of Law, at the University of Auckland. First published by Newsroom and republished by Asia Pacific Report with the author’s permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Former New Zealand prime minister Helen Clark is supporting aid agencies’ decision to halt operations in Afghanistan, and a UN official has urged the Taliban to reverse its ban on women humanitarian workers.

The country’s Taliban administration on Saturday ordered all local and foreign non-governmental organisations (NGOs) not to let female staff work until further notice.

It said the move, which was condemned globally, was justified because some women had not adhered to the Taliban’s interpretation of Islamic dress code for women.

The news led to the beginning of a withdrawal by organisations such as the Norwegian Refugee Council, Save the Children, and Unicef.

Clark, who also used to head the UN Development Programme, said the aid agencies were forced to suspend their services or yield to an oppressive policy.

She condemned Afghanistan’s banning of female humanitarian workers.

“It’s a huge violation of human rights of women. Where do you draw the line? If the organisations simply capitulated to this edict from the Taliban, they would be seen to be going along with a huge violation of women’s rights,” she said.

“So it is important that big organisations are speaking out now as they have, and are saying they will suspend their operations while this policy holds.

“The problem is the Taliban and these horrible hostile decisions that they’re taking towards women.”

Clark said the Taliban had tried to present itself as more legitimate than the last time it ruled Afghanistan, but a leopard did not change its spots.

She expected the Taliban leadership would face strong ongoing pressure from the UN and other entities, and they would see the consequences of foreign aid groups withdrawing.

UN calls for Taliban to reverse the decision
A senior UN official has urged Afghanistan’s Taliban administration to reverse the ban on female humanitarian workers, and charities fear it will worsen winter hardships.

“Millions of Afghans need humanitarian assistance and removing barriers is vital,” UNAMA said in the statement, adding that its acting head and humanitarian coordinator Ramiz Alakbarov had met with Economy Minister Mohammad Hanif.

The directives barring women from working at NGOs came from Hanif’s ministry.

The orders did not apply directly to the United Nations, but many of its programmes were carried out by NGOs subject to the order.

Four major global NGOs, whose humanitarian efforts had reached millions of Afghans, announced they were suspending operations on Sunday. Other smaller NGOs had also announced suspensions, including UK-based Islamic Relief Worldwide.

The NGOs said they were unable to run their programmes without female staff.

More than half of Afghanistan’s population relied on humanitarian aid, according to aid agencies. Basic aid was more critical during the mountainous nation’s harsh winter.

Two spokesmen for the Taliban administration did not respond to queries on the suspension of humanitarian programmes.

NGOs were also a critical source of employment for tens of thousands of Afghans, particularly women, as the local economy had collapsed following the withdrawal of US-led foreign forces and the Taliban takeover last year.

One such employee, a 27-year-old female aid worker in western Afghanistan who asked for her identity to be concealed because she feared retribution, said that her NGO had shut its office on Saturday and she could not go to work.

The NGO, funded by a Western country, worked with women in the agriculture sector, helping them set up sustainable incomes.

She said she was worried that losing her job would have a huge impact on her family because she was a single woman and the sole breadwinner.

Her father was dead and her mother was a housewife, she said, adding that she supported four sisters, three of whom were university students who could not complete their degrees since the Taliban administration barred women from attending university last week.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ. 

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

Experts are warning that development gains across the Pacific region over the past 10 years could be undone due to the challenges of the covid-19 pandemic.

The aid organisation World Vision wants a once in a life time multinational effort to rebuild Pacific livelihoods that have been shattered by the pandemic.

In the Pacific Aftershocks report, World Vision reveals the results of a survey of households across the region.

It said while much of the Pacific had not had local cases of covid-19 there had been a tragic human cost due to the economic fallout.

World Vision New Zealand’s TJ Grant said the economic devastation could take a greater toll than the virus itself.

Grant said that while many Pacific nations managed to keep infections and transmissions at bay, vulnerable people were now facing the huge cost of closed borders and isolation.

“Almost two-thirds of households have either lost jobs or lost income and have had to resort to other alternative sources of income.

‘One in five houses skip meals’
“Related to that one in five houses is having to skip meals or having cheaper meals because they can’t afford to have a healthy diet. One of the compounding factors here is that through the covid pandemic food prices have risen significantly in many Pacific countries,” Grant said.

One of the nations worst hit by the economic downturn caused by the pandemic is Vanuatu.

World Vision’s country director in Vanuatu, Kendra Gates Derousseau, said Vanuatu had managed to keep covid out yet its food prices had soared by 30.6 percent.

She said this put healthy food out of reach for countless urban ni-Vanuatu.

“Vanuatu is quite dependent on imports, particularly for urban households that work and cannot spend their time doing agricultural gardening and featuring fresh food. And also the price of transport has gone up significantly because the importation of petrol has slowed down,” she said.

World Vision wants Australia and New Zealand to lead a once in a generation step up to help these developing nations overcome the devastating impacts of covid.

It is looking for a comprehensive international programme of support for economic recovery and to address key economic, health and child welfare issues.

Stunted growth exacerbated
Grant said stunted growth, as a result of poor nutrition, was a perennial Pacific problem, and occurrence like the virus and its aftershocks exacerbated it.

Derousseau said New Zealand and Australia and other donor nations could not abandon the Pacific when they were most needed.

“The covid-19 pandemic is a global phenomenon as well as climate change and we know that the Pacific Island nations are extraordinarily affected — even more so than other regions of the world, and so a regional crisis like this requires a regional response.”

Roland Rajah is a development economist with Australian think tank, the Lowy Institute. He has written that the Pacific will be economically put back 10 years by the pandemic.

Rajah told RNZ Pacific it was definitely among the worst affected by the lockdowns.

“Already other parts of the world, South East Asia, even sub-Saharan Africa, Latin American, the Caribbean, they are all on the rebound already,” he said.

“Their prospects for recovery are much stronger than for the Pacific. And there are a variety of reasons for that, but it’s fair to say that it’s amongst the worst affected anywhere in the world.”

He said the Pacific nations typically can’t follow the path of the developed nations and provide stimulis packages because they don’t have the funds.

But he suggests properly targetted infrastructure investment — that that is aimed at also addressing climate change — assisted by the metropolitan powers, may go some way to providing employment and incomes boosts.

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz