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A Ladder for the Palestinians to Climb Down from the Tree

(Ha'aretz) Akiva Eldar - "It is not enough for an applicant to claim that a particular place or property is a 'home,'" the judges of the European Court of Human Rights ruled last week, to the dismay of the Greek refugees from Northern Cyprus who had filed a petition concerning their right of return. "He or she must show that they enjoy concrete and persisting links with the property concerned." The Greek refugees, who had fled during the Turkish occupation in the 1970s, have demanded that their property be returned to them. However, a majority of the court's 17 judges fully accepted the Turkish position - whereby reality overrides "family roots" and time outweighs sentiment. With this decision, one of the world's most respected international legal institutions on the matter of human rights thus opened a new chapter in the ongoing controversy surrounding refugees' right to return to their homes. Eyal Benvenisti, a professor in Tel Aviv University's law faculty and an international expert on issues concerning refugees, attributes great importance to the decision: "The injured side that decides to wait until the end of time will one day wake up to discover his rights have become obsolete....In other words, anyone who is interested in ending the conflict and solving the refugee problem has received from the European court a very convenient ladder for climbing down from the tree."
2010-03-12 09:28:51
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