Shawan Jabarin

Shawan Rateb Abdallah Jabarin (; born 1960) is the general director of Al-Haq, a Palestinian human rights organization in the West Bank. From 2005 to 2009, Jabarin was a member of the board of directors of Defense for Children International – Palestine, the national section of the Geneva-based Defense for Children International, a non-governmental organization (NGO) established in 1979.

Respected as a human-rights activist by Human Rights Watch (HRW), Amnesty International, and various Palestinian human-rights groups, and condemned by many Israeli and other organizations, He has won multiple human-rights awards and contributed to such journals as Foreign Policy. Israel's Supreme Court has described him as a "senior activist" for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Jabarin has been barred from entering Jordan on security grounds, he is a graduate of the Irish Centre of Human Rights, NUI Galway, where he completed the LL.M programme in 2004-5 through a grant from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs’ Irish Aid programme.

Career

Al Haq Jabarin began volunteering with Al-Haq while he was a student at Birzeit University. He joined Al-Haq as a field researcher in 1987. He became its director in 2006; Bernstein said that HRW had done the "wrong thing" and that "they could have put other people on the board who would not have created this problem for them".

Stuart Robinowitz, a lawyer who had led three human-rights fact-finding missions for HRW and the American Bar Association, was described as "distressed that the appointment seems to have been made without disclosure of all the facts by two HRW executives, Middle East and North African director for HRW, Sarah Leah Whitson, and the executive director, Ken Roth". Robinowitz complained that "Whitson in her written presentation stated that Jabarin had had no association since PFLP since 1987, thereby ignoring actions against him by Israel and Jordan security authorities in 2005 and 2006, and by the Israeli Supreme Court in 2007, 2008, and 2009".

Apropos of Jabarin's HRW appointment, Sir Harold Evans stated that "Israel's Supreme Court says Shawan Jabarin leads a double life, as a human rights activist who also has a secret association with a terrorist organization. Human Rights Watch says he does invaluable work for peace, but its founding chairman and others consider Jabarin's appointment shocking". He said that "Human Rights Watch has been working together with Jabarin and Al-Haq in an informal capacity for a long time, but the official appointment is an example of HRW Executive Director Ken Roth’s and the group’s Middle East and North Africa division’s enlistment in the widespread delegitimization campaign being conducted against Israel".

In response to criticism of HRW's appointment of Jabarin to its Middle East board, HRW's program director, Iain Levine, described the Supreme Court's charges as "curious and misguided" and insisted that Jabarin was "the reason that tyrants in the Middle East are now trembling in their boots."

Other professional activities He took part in a four-month programme on human-rights advocacy at Columbia University in 2001. Jabarin had also been elected Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists. In August 2016, Jabarin was elected Secretary General of FIDH.

Jabarin participated in an event entitled "Palestine, Israel & International Law: The ICC and beyond” on October 11, 2013, at Trinity College in Dublin. He spent six years in Israeli prison without charge or trial during the 1980s and 1990s.

A 1994 Israeli statement to the UN alleged that Jabarin “had not discontinued his terrorist involvement and maintains his position in the leadership of the PFLP.” A June 2007 decision by the Israeli Supreme Court called Jabarin a "Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde."

Jabarin has said "he had lost track of the number of times he’d been arrested and detained by Israeli authorities. He estimated that he’d spent a cumulative eight years in administrative detention and claimed to have been beaten on numerous occasions".

Travel ban Jabarin has been denied exit visas by Israel and Jordan on several occasions due to alleged ties to the PFLP. Israel placed a travel ban on Jabarin in 2006, after he was made director of Al-Haq. Israel cited "secret evidence" indicating that he was still involved with PFLP. The travel ban was condemned by Amnesty International, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, and Human Rights Watch, all of which dismissed Israel's claims that it was founded on "security" considerations.

2009 Netherlands trip The Dutch government asked Israel in 2009 to lift the travel ban on Jabarin so that he could travel to the Netherlands to accept the Dutch Geuzenpenning Award for human rights defenders.

While upholding the travel ban, the Court underscored that it was not meant as a “punishment” for illegal activity but as a security measure. Irish human rights organization Front Line Defenders expressed concern about the travel ban, noting that Jabarin had been allowed to leave the West Bank eight times between 1999 and February 2006, before becoming General Director of Al-Haq.

In March 2009, HRW issued a press release opposing the travel ban, in response to which the Vice Chair of HRW, film producer Sid Sheinberg, protested HRW not mentioning in the press release the Israeli Supreme Court's judgments against Jabarin. In a March 17, 2009, email to HRW officials, Sheinberg wrote that the press release was "misleading by important omission and therefore radically inaccurate." Sarah Leah Whitson, the Middle East director for Human Rights Watch, criticized the upholding of the travel ban, praising Jabarin for his "courageous work."

HRW and Amnesty International issued a statement on March 2, 2012, calling for Israel, which had allowed Jabarin to travel to Geneva, to revoke the travel ban entirely. They said that “if the authorities deem that there is no security risk in Jabarin travelling to meet with Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue today, it is hard to understand why the travel ban should remain in place at all, especially in the absence of any public evidence justifying it.”

2026 France trip In April 2026, the French government refused to grant an entry visa to Jabarin, who was due to appear before the European Parliament's Subcommittee on Human Rights in Strasbourg. Human Rights Watch described the government's actions as a "shameful decision", while Amnesty International called it a "blatant assault on human rights".

Views

General views of Israel and the occupation Jabarin has said that the Israelis "have no peace on their agenda. If it is on their agenda, they have their own interpretation. Israel is killing Palestinians every day, pushing peace further away. Israel killed any opportunity for real peace, completely ignoring Palestinian fundamental rights. For them, Palestinians are not a people that have rights." He claimed that Israeli settlers, even the young generation, show not just hatred, they show it in a very, very aggressive way." He said he foresaw "an explosion coming" in which the settlers would "be the main players," and he claimed to worry that there would be a large-scale massacre of Palestinians.

West Bank settlements

Jabarin said in 2013 that Israeli support for West Bank settlements was a violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. "The occupation, it’s a temporary presence. And by transferring civilians, you try to make it permanent. That’s the issue. The nature of that, it’s like a colonialist nature," he said. "Here in [the] Palestinian case, settlements have affected every aspect of Palestinians’ lives. The destruction of their property, the confiscation of their land, the expanding of Israeli jurisdiction over the settlements ... the legal characterization is, it's illegal apartheid." He has also said that while the European Union “has been quite outspoken in condemning settlements and their expansion, they continue to import produce from these same settlements and in doing so, help to sustain their very existence".

Administrative detention

Jabarin said in March 2013 that Israel's policy of administrative detention of Palestinian captives was "a violation of the principles and standards of due process and fair trial practiced in all democracies." He said that even though "Israel calls them terrorists, Palestinians look at them as heroes, as leaders."

Israel's treatment of media

Jabarin said in December 2012 that "Israel targeted journalists in Gaza intentionally. They feel these days that the media have power. The media can defeat any party by taking reports outside. It comes with the evolution of the media, the social media. It is everywhere available. As occupying power, Israel does not like the reporting, that is why the media and journalists were intentionally targeted. They [Israel] have no moral [sic]. The aim is not to get the reality out. The aim is to create dust and make people not to see what happens."

Land swaps In a June 2013 article, Jabarin argued against the Arab League's proposed inclusion of "land swaps as a central feature of renewed negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians." The plan, which was welcomed by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, would involve what Jabarin called "a softening of the 2002 Arab peace plan, which proposed that 22 Arab countries would normalize ties with Israel in return for withdrawal from land that it occupied in 1967." Jabarin opined that "mutual land swaps are problematic on both a political and a legal level; not least because they would inevitably involve protecting illegal Israeli settlements and their infrastructure in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which have been universally recognized as in violation of international law. Therefore, an agreement of this nature would implicitly condone Israel's illegal settlement enterprise, which routinely dispossesses Palestinians of their land and appropriates natural resources in the OPT. Such a move would also set a dangerous precedent in which prolonged colonial policies perpetrated by an aggressive occupier are eventually accepted by the international community. Any land swap agreement would further undermine fundamental norms of international law, such as the prohibition of acquisition of territory through force and the right to self-determination of the Palestinian people." Thus, land swaps should "be removed from the negotiating table."

Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions

He supports Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions but "at Al-Haq, we don’t use the term 'boycott.' Not because we don’t believe in it, but because there is no legal basis or obligation for it. Our points of reference are human rights, international humanitarian law and public law. There is a legal basis for 'sanctions' and 'divestment' under international law, but there is no legal basis for boycott. With a boycott, the public is responsible." and an award from the Danish PL Foundation.

Personal life He is a father of four and counts former United States President Jimmy Carter as a friend.