The Final Phases of Genocide: What Global Civil Society Must Do. A Conversation with International Jurists Lara Elborno, Penny Green & Richard Falk

On May 15, international legal experts Lara Elborno, Richard Falk, and Penny Green joined me to discuss the work of the Gaza Tribunal, a group devoted to creating an archive of facts and a set of documents and arguments to help international civil society fight against the genocide in Gaza and the Zionist regime that, along with the United States, has perpetrated this atrocity.  Today they all return to update us. They present a grim picture of what they call the final phase of genocide and note both the overwhelming global support for Palestine and the concurrent repression against advocacy and protest. This is a critical episode to listen to and share.

Lara Elborno is a Palestinian-American lawyer specialized in international disputes. She has worked for over 10 years as counsel acting for individuals, private entities, and States in international commercial and investment arbitrations. She dedicates a large part of her legal practice to pro-bono work including the representation of asylum seekers in France and advising clients on matters related to IHRL and the business and human rights framework.  She previously taught US and UK constitutional law at the Université de Paris II - Panthéon Assas. She currently serves as a board member of ARDD-Europe and sits on the Steering Committee of the Gaza Tribunal. She has moreover appeared as a commentator on Al Jazeera, TRTWorld, DoubleDown News, and George Galloway's MOAT speaking about the Palestinian liberation struggle, offering analysis and critiques of international law."\

Richard Falk is Albert G. Milbank Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University (1961-2001) and Chair of Global Law, Faculty of Law, Queen Mary University London. Since 2002 has been a Research Fellow at the Orfalea Center of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Between 2008 and 2014 he served as UN Special Rapporteur on Israeli Violations of Human Rights in Occupied Palestine.

He is Senior Vice President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, having served for seven years as Chair of its Board. He is Chair of the Board of Trustees of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. He is co-director of the Centre of Climate Crime, QMUL.

Falk has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize several times since 2008.

His recent books include (Re)Imagining Humane Global Governance (2014), Power Shift: The New Global Order (2016), Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace (2017), Revisiting the Vietnam War (ed. Stefan Andersson, 2017), On Nuclear Weapons: Denuclearization, Demilitarization and Disarmament (ed. Stefan Andersson & Curt Dahlgren, 2019.

Penny Green is Professor of Law and Globalisation at QMUL and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She has published extensively on state crime theory, resistance to state violence and the Rohingya genocide, (including with Tony Ward, State Crime: Governments, Violence and Corruption, 2004 and State Crime and Civil Activism 2019). She has a long track record of researching in hostile environments and has conducted fieldwork in the UK, Turkey, Kurdistan, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Israel, Tunisia, Myanmar and Bangladesh. In 2015 she and her colleagues published ‘Countdown to Annihilation: Genocide in Myanmar’ and in March 2018 ‘The Genocide is Over: the genocide continues’. Professor Green is Founder and co-Director of the award winning International State Crime Initiative (ISCI); co-editor in Chief of the international journal, State Crime; Executive member of the Gaza Tribunal and Palestine Book Awards judge. Her new book with Thomas MacManus Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold: Myanmar and the Rohingya will be published by Rutgers university Press in 2025