Dr. John Reynolds:

I thank the Senator for the question. Professor Dugard is a South African international lawyer who was one of the leading anti-apartheid lawyers during the apartheid regime in South Africa. Much of his analysis as special rapporteur and in his scholarship has been about the dynamics and nature of an apartheid regime in occupied Palestine. It is relevant to the issue because the settlements are central to the entire two-tier system of law, administrative regulations and military courts for Palestinians and Israeli civil courts and civil law for Israeli settlers. For the same offence or crime in the same territory, it is two entirely separate legal systems. There is physical segregation and separation, movement restrictions, large-scale confiscation and theft of land, and the division of the population into separate reserves and ghettos. All of that is what is defined as apartheid under international law. Apartheid has a legal definition that comes from the experience in southern Africa but is not limited to that. This is the analysis that Palestinian organisations and lawyers have been doing for many decades. In recent years, some of the leading Jewish Israeli organisations, including B’Tselem, and the international human rights organisations, as the Senator may be well aware, have done extensive and detailed reporting on this. Relevant to the Bill, this is not separate from the issue of the settlements. The settlements are a core part of the reason that an apartheid regime exists in the first place. Therefore, to address the apartheid regime, you have to address the settlements and vice versa. The prohibition on apartheid and racial discrimination is at that jus cogens-peremptory norm level, from which there are no exceptions or derogations. All states, regardless of whether they have signed particular treaties, are bound in their responsibilities not to aid, assist or support an apartheid system.