Statement by Mr Shoman – Belize – at the ICJ:
I. Self-determination
1. President, Members of the Court, the Palestinian people have an inalienable right to self-determination and complete independence1, which has always been systematically denied to them.
2. The League of Nations Mandate territories had a right to independence which was realized for all of them – except for Palestine.
3. The United Nations Charter enshrined the right to self-determination for the protection of all peoples except, in practice, for the Palestinians, more than half of whom were massacred or driven off their land in the 1948 Nakba. Their land was partitioned and half of it allocated to a new State that promptly extended it to 78 per cent by brute force.
4. In 1967, just seven years after resolution 15146, Israel commenced its still-continuing occupation of the entirety of the remaining Palestinian territory.