Falk tapped for U.N. human rights team

University politics professor Richard Falk, a highly respected authority on international law and human rights, has been appointed by the chairman of the U.N. Commission on Human Rights to a three-person team that will investigate alleged human rights violations in Israeli-occupied territories.

"We'll take account of the fact-finding missions that have already taken place," Falk said in an interview. "And our effort will be to validate those factual findings and to try to provide a legal interpretation."

The commission will investigate whether Israel has used "excessive force" in dealing with Palestinian demonstrations, he said. It will prepare a report to be presented to the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in early March.

Though Falk has received numerous academic honors — including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a position as honorary vice president of the American Society of International Law — he has never been appointed to a U.N. official investigative commission of this sort, he said.

However, he recently served on a 13-member commission on the conflict in Kosovo that was sponsored by the Swedish government in collaboration with the secretary general of the United Nations. Nevertheless, his experiences on that commission did not necessarily prepare him to work on this one, Falk said.

"[In Kosovo] the violence was over and it was trying to understand the broad outlines of the NATO war," he said. "But working in the occupied territories will present some special challenges."

"The most difficult background issue . . . is that the government of Israel is very sensitive about any investigation of this sort," said Falk, who anticipates some degree of non-cooperation by the Israeli government.

The occupied territories are a dangerous place, with violent acts occurring almost every day, he said. But while this will be one of the challenges that the U.N. investigators will face, Falk said that concern was not enough to dissuade him from serving on the commission.

"I try to put it out of my mind," he said. "I guess I wouldn't be doing this sort of thing if I was too worried."

"The substantive difficulty is, first of all, to understand whether in view of the very long occupation of these territories by Israel, the Palestinian people have some right of resistance," he said. "That's a very tricky and difficult issue."

According to politics department chair Jeffrey Herbst, Falk is well-suited for this assignment. He has written more than 40 books on international law and politics and is well respected in academia. "It's quite impressive, and we're all quite envious," he said.

Falk will retire from his faculty position at Princeton in June to teach at the University of California at Santa Barbara.