Shawan Jabarin

Shawan Rateb Abdallah Jabarin (born 1960 in Sayer, West Bank) is the General Director of Al-Haq, the largest, oldest and best known human-rights organization in the West Bank. He is also a high-ranking official of Human Rights Watch (HRW).

Respected as a human-rights champion by HRW, Amnesty International, and various Palestinian human-rights groups, and condemned by many Israeli and other organizations, Jabarin has been described as “an activist to some, a terrorist to others.” While he has won many human-rights awards and contributed to such journals as Foreign Policy, Israel considers him a security threat and banned him from international travel between 2006 and 2013.

Jabarin was born in 1960 in the village of Sayeir (Sayer), in the Hebron district. His family were West Bank farmers. As a young men he was subjected to administrative detention and interrogation by Israeli authorities.

He studied sociology at Birzeit University in the 1980s, and later studied law in Ireland. He is a graduate of the Irish Centre of Human Rights, NUI Galway, where he completed the LL.M programme in 2004-5 through a grant from the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs’ Irish Aid programme.

He began volunteering with Al-Haq while he was a student at Birzeit University. He joined Al-Haq as a field researcher in 1987. He became its director in 2006.

His office is in Ramallah.

Under his leadership, according to one source, “Al Haq's staff of Palestinian and foreign researchers have shifted their search for legal redress from Israel's military and civilian courts to foreign venues,” practicing what is widely referred to as “lawfare.”

In February 2011, Jabarin was appointed by Human Rights Watch (HRW) to its advisory board that oversees reporting on Arab-Israeli affairs. Robert Bernstein, HRW's founding chairman and chairman emeritus, told the Daily Beast: “I am of course shocked but even more saddened that an organization dedicated to the rule of law seems to be deliberately undermining it.” Bernstein said that HRW had done the “wrong thing” and that “they could have put other people on the board who would not have created this problem for them.”

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