Shawan Jabarin is a Palestinian human rights defender, General Director of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq. He is also a member of Human Rights Watch Middle East Advisory Board. He was Amnesty International's first Palestinian Prisoner of Conscience, and he has worked for years promoting human rights in the face of Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Al Haq was established in 1979, has special consultative status with the United Nations, and works to protect and promote human rights and the rule of law in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT).
Human rights defenders in the OPT are subjected to acts of harassment, restrictions on freedom of movement, stigmatisation, abductions, long periods of arbitrary detention usually under administrative detention orders, illegal searches of their homes and offices and killings. Many of the violations are state-sanctioned, or if not sanctioned at the highest levels of the Israeli political and military establishment, then condoned by the ongoing policy of impunity which permeates the military and judicial system in relation to the OPT.
