Legal assessments of the Gaza flotilla raid

This page is subject to the extended confirmed restriction related to the Arab-Israeli conflict.Many legal assessments of the Gaza flotilla raid were published subsequent to the event.

The Mission ... considers that the series of acts that deprive Palestinians in the Gaza Strip of their means of subsistence, employment, housing and water, that deny their freedom of movement and their right to leave and enter their own country, that limit their rights to access a court of law and an effective remedy, could lead a competent court to find that the crime of persecution, a crime against humanity, has been committed.

He said that:[19] the Convention on the Law of the Sea stipulates that a coastal state may consider intervention if a ship is engaged in arms and drug smuggling, the slave trade or terrorist activities.

[20] Douglas Guilfoyle, a lecturer at University College of London since 2007 who authored Shipping Interdiction and the Law of the Sea in 2009, told Aljazeera that, while a blockade is a recognized tool of warfare, a close look should be taken as to whether there was proper notification of the Gaza blockade, and whether it inflicted "excessive damage to the civilian population in relation to the concrete military advantage expected".

"[22] The European Parliament, in a June 14, 2010 resolution, called the Gaza blockade "collective punishment in contravention of international humanitarian law" and demanded its immediate cessation.

[5] Similarly, Allen Weiner, former U.S. State Department attorney and legal counselor at the American Embassy in The Hague, and now a Stanford Law School professor, said "the Israeli blockade itself against Gaza itself is not illegal".

[26] He addressed the charge by Human Rights Watch that the blockade of a terrorist organization constitutes a collective penalty against civilians, ostensibly violating Article 33 of the fourth Geneva Convention, by saying "This argument won't stand up.

The blockading party has the right to fashion the arrangements, including search at a nearby port, under which passage of humanitarian goods is permitted.[27]U.S.

[29] Professor Wedgwood opined that the goal of the flotilla was to: "denude Israel of what it thinks it was guaranteed in the 1993 Oslo Accords which preceded the Gaza-Jericho Agreement, which is the control of the external borders of Gaza and West Bank....

[10] A group of Israeli lawyers petitioned the Supreme Court of Israel charging that Israel had violated the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea by capturing the boats in international waters,[30] but a Supreme Court ruling signed by Justice Dorit Beinish rejected those suits outright.

[31][32] José María Ruiz Soroa, a Spanish maritime law scholar and co-author of the legal commentary Manual de derecho de la navegación marítima,[33] said that Israel is not entitled according to international law to constrain the freedom of navigation of any ship on the high seas, except in a number of situations that do not apply to the Gaza flotilla case.

Bisharat wrote that "flotilla passengers were entitled to defend themselves against Israel's forcible boarding of the Mavi Marmara, whether or not Israeli commandos fired immediately on landing on the ship's deck".

"[36] In a legal analysis published by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, a staff expert on international law said that countries are not allowed to extend their sovereignty on areas outside their coastal waters.

[28][38] Jason Alderwick, a maritime analyst at the International Institute for Strategic Studies of London, said that the Israeli raid did not appear to have been conducted lawfully under the convention.

[7] She pointed out that the U.S. itself, as a neutral throughout most of the 1800s, submitted its ships to inspections on the high seas to allow belligerents to make sure that its cargoes weren't actually fueling any of the European wars.

[26] Professor Posner, as well, wrote that "longstanding customary international law permits states to enforce publicly announced blockades on the high seas".

[44] In its September 2010 report the UN panel found that the IDF broke international law, and that there was evidence sufficient to initiate prosecutions for breaches of the Geneva Convention.

The report of the fact-finding mission stated that the killing of Dogan and the five Turks by the Israeli commandos "can be characterized as extra-legal, arbitrary and summary executions.

[11] Minister Davutoğlu called the raid "a grave breach of international law and constituted banditry and piracy - it was "murder" conducted by a State, without justification."

Turkey's deputy parliament speaker, Guldal Mumcu, said in a declaration that "[t]his attack was an open violation of United Nations rules and international law.

"[47] As to the use of force when boarding a ship in such circumstances, it is legal but must be proportionate, according to Commander James Kraska, professor of international law at the U.S.

[6]Israeli authorities said marines who boarded the vessel opened fire in self-defense after activists clubbed and stabbed them and snatched some of their weapons.

[26][28] The Paris Declaration Respecting Maritime Law, cited in a United Nations report on the raid which concluded that the blockade had been a legitimate and legally implemented response to an act of aggression, states that "The neutral flag covers enemy's goods, with the exception of contraband of war".

These rules were conceived in an age where inspection for contraband necessarily had to take place at sea, and do not stipulate that ships must alter their course to visit a port of a blockading nation.

[49] The Court rejected petitions by right wingers (the Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center and the Almagor Terrorist Victims Association) to prevent the release and deportation of activists who attacked the IDF soldiers pending an investigation.

[32] The Court supported the attorney general's decision to release the activists, noting that: After considering the fact that nine of the flotilla's participants were killed and dozens were injured, he reached the conclusion that the public, political, and security interests in this case trump law enforcement.

On 5 July 2013, the Presidency of the International Criminal Court (ICC) assigned “the Situation on Registered Vessels of the Union of the Comoros, the Hellenic Republic and the Kingdom of Cambodia” to Pre-Trial Chamber I.

[52][53] On 6 November 2014, the Office of the Prosecutor announced that it was concluding the preliminary examination of the situation referred by the Union of Comoros because legal requirements of the Rome Statute had not been met.

On 29 January 2015, the Representatives of the Government of the Union of the Comoros filed an Application for Review of the Prosecutor's Decision of 6 November 2014 not to initiate an investigation in the Situation.

On 16 July 2015, Pre-Trial Chamber I of the International Criminal Court (ICC), composed of Judges Joyce Aluoch, Cuno Tarfusser and Péter Kovàcs, by majority, Judge Péter Kovács dissenting, granted the request of the Union of Comoros to review the decision of the ICC Prosecutor not to investigate the attack against a Humanitarian Aid Flotilla by the Israeli Armed Forces on 31 May 2010 and requested the Prosecutor to reconsider such decision.