Adalah’s Director profiled in “JUSTICE: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution”
Adalah’s General Director Attorney Hassan Jabareen is featured in photographer Mariana Cook's latest book, "Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution." The book, which was launched on 4 April 2013 in New York, includes Cook's portraits and short personal essays from 99 prominent human rights defenders from around the world. Attorney Jabareen appears alongside famous figures such as the Burmese democracy activist, Aung San Suu Kyi, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and former US President Jimmy Carter, as well as human rights lawyers Steven Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights, Barry Scheck of the Innocence Project, and many other colleagues.
Photos tribute to determined defenders
Cook writes that her photographs are designed to "pay tribute, not only to the courage of independent thought and action, but also to the dogged insistence that reason and fairness prevail." The book shows the myriad ways that activists have fought for justice, as well as how much work remains to be done.
Anthony Lewis wrote introduction
Recently deceased legal journalist Anthony Lewis composed the book's introduction, an examination of the history and current challenges facing human rights work. He asks "What drives men and women to overcome the natural human desire for a quiet life and struggle for the rights of all?"
Jabareen driven by challenges of being Arab Palestinian in Israel
Attorney Jabareen's family history drives him. Israel confiscated half of his grandfather’s land following the War of 1948, and the family was split between villages on either side of the Green Line.
However, despite the challenges of living under the Israeli military regime imposed on all Arab Palestinians in the state until 1966, Attorney Jabareen's grandfather encouraged both his son and grandson to become successful lawyers.
The journey was not easy: Attorney Jabareen writes that even in the late 1980s, he was one of only two Arab students in his Tel Aviv University law school class. During his studies during the first Intifada, he was detained for seven days for participating peacefully in a demonstration.
Victories inspired by grandfather
A decade later, Attorney Jabareen founded Adalah with his wife, Rina, and now advocates on behalf of the Arab Palestinian minority in Israel. Through legal successes and losses, Jabareen writes about wishing his grandfather was alive "so I could share my small legal victories with him" – victories of Adalah that include banning soldiers from using Palestinians as "human shields" during military operations, winning the right for a Palestinian couple to move into a small community after being rejected for "social unsuitability," and getting Arab elected representatives to run in elections after their fellow lawmakers disqualified them.
As Lewis points out in the introduction, "Judges and lawyers… have stepped in, among others, as "governments have failed tests of law and justice". However, "In an era so dominated by fear, the struggle for human rights will not become any easier. We have to believe that the human spirit will prove to be more important part of man's nature."
Photo - Featured in JUSTICE, from left to right: Egyptian Initiative for Person Rights (EIPR) Director Hossam Baghat, Adalah’s General Director Hassan Jabareen, and Executive Director of The American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero
The book is Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution, by Mariana Cook with a forward by Anthony Lewis. Dalmani, on sale 31 March 2013, hardcover: $50.00
Read also: Dalmani Publishers Press Release
