NEW YORK (Press Release)– The Israeli civil rights group, Shurat HaDin-Israel Law Center, has warned United Nations’ Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that awarding the UN Development Programme’s annual Equator Prize for 2014 to the Union of Agricultural Work Committee (“UAWC”), a Palestinian organization that is formally affiliated with the terrorist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (“PFLP”), is illegal and the Prize should be rescinded. The Equator Prize was due to be awarded to the UAWC on Monday, September 22, 2014 in New York.
In a warning letter sent by Shurat HaDin to Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the civil rights group notes that the UAWC is the PLFP’s official agricultural organisation and is an instrumentality of the terrorist group. The PFLP is a proscribed terrorist organisation designated by numerous world governments including the United States and the European Union. The PFLP is also officially designated under United States law as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” as a “Specially Designated Terrorist,” and as a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”
As such, it is an offence, under Chapter Seven of the United Nations Charter and Security Council Resolution 1373, for any individual or body to make an asset available to a proscribed organization. It also violates numerous national and international laws. The letter contends that by providing any financial support to the UAWC, the United Nations directly makes assets available to the PLFP.
According to the letter’s authors, Israeli attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and American attorney Robert Tolchin, they have complied compelling evidence of the UAWC’s affiliation with the PFLP. As they wrote: “The PLFP’s funding is shared and distributed among its family of institutions, including the UAWC. The PLFP is the controlling hand of the UAWC and PLFP members form the executive of the organisation.”
The letter notes that the law is strict when it comes to aiding and abetting terrorism, citing the United States Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the case of Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, 130 S.Ct. 2705 (2010), which found that providing any assistance or support to terrorists, including putatively benign forms of assistance (such as agricultural aid) is criminal. The provision of a prize and funding to the UAWC, which ultimately inures to the benefit and interests of the PLFP, would constitute the type of seemingly innocuous material support that would render organisations criminally and civilly liable. This includes liability for terrorist attacks carried out by the PLFP against innocent Israeli civilians.
The letter demands that the United Nation’s Development Programme take immediate action to cancel the awarding of the Equator Prize to the UAWC. It warns that providing a Palestinian terrorist instrumentality like UAWC any degree of legitimacy and funding would be a reckless and dangerous disregard for the safety and lives of the civilians the PFLP is committed to violently targeting.
Darshan-Leitner and Tolchin have urged the U.N. to contact them to discuss the full dossier of the evidence and launch a formal investigation into how the UAWC was chosen for the Equator Prize in the first place.
According to Darshan-Leitner: “It is shocking that the UN could even consider awarding the UAWC a prize and financial support. Terrorist groups like the notorious PFLP which have murdered and injured hundreds of innocent victims need to be forcefully eradicated not legitimized and celebrated. This episode is symptomatic of all that is wrong with those negligently attempting to fund projects in Gaza and the Palestinian territories – they have no idea who they are working with, no means of investigating the terrorist connections and they strenuously refuse to implement any transparency measures. As in the past, I am afraid that all of the international aid being hysterically bestowed upon Gaza and the Palestinian areas will wind up in the hands of the suicide bombers, jihadist groups and rocket crews.”
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Preceding provided by Shurat HaDin