Sunday, April 08, 2012

Let's Get Legal About Migron

From a legal opinion offered by Howard Grief on the Migron Affair:
...Under the prevailing rules of international law, as embodied in Articles 42, 52 and 55 of the 1907 Hague Regulations, Jordan, as the Occupying Power of Judea and Samaria, being lands that were earmarked for the Jewish National Home and State under the Balfour Declaration, San Remo Resolution, the Franco-British Boundary Convention of December 23, 1920 and the Mandate for Palestine, which Jordan had re-named the “West Bank”, had no legal authority to grant to its citizens or subjects parcels of land that did not legally belong to it... ...Since Jordan was only the administrator or usufructuary of Judea and Samaria, it was never the legal owner or sovereign of this land. Hence, King Hussein’s land grant to various of his subjects has no legal validity or basis in international law, in the law of Palestine during the Mandate period, nor in Israeli law today...Under these circumstances, it was incumbent on the Government and the Supreme Court to carry out a thorough inquiry to determine whether the deeds of ownership held by the Arab Petitioners, which they had received from Jordan, were indeed valid, a duty neither discharged or even considered. Moreover, it was wrong for the Government to rely only on the questionable and unproven findings of the Sasson Report for proof of ownership. The Petitioners themselves were obliged to prove their ownership to the satisfaction of the Government and the Court. Prior to King Hussein’s land grant in Judea and Samaria, the land where Migron is located was not privately owned...To repeat: Migron was therefore never “private Arab property”, a fact of immense importance in determining the legality of the settlement...It is true that ownership of land may eventually be acquired by prescription, unless interrupted by protest by the actual owner, through continuous possession of the land by squatters who originally had no right or title to the land. However, in the Migron case the alleged Arab owners never truly possessed the land in the sense required for prescription, since the land was never cultivated or farmed by them, but rather lay fallow or unploughed and was no more than unused vacant land until the Migron community was established in 1999...
Get them to a court. ^

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