GENEVA, June 28 (Xinhua) -- The international community must insist that a proposal for an end to Israel's occupation of Palestine and a "just and durable settlement" of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict needs to be rooted in human rights and international law, a UN expert said Friday.
"Without the framework of international law, any peace plan, including the forthcoming proposal from the United States, will crash upon the shoals of political realism," said Michael Lynk, the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian Territory occupied since 1967.
"Prior plans for Middle East peace over the past five decades have all failed, in large part because they did not seriously insist upon a rights-based approach to peace between Israelis and Palestinians," Lynk said in a statement, after a two-day workshop in Bahrain on the economic aspects of a possible peace plan.
The Special Rapporteur said that international law, on the principles of humanitarian protection, human rights, equality, and justice, has been expressed in hundreds of United Nations resolutions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
He said that Palestinians and Israelis are entitled to the individual and collective human rights enshrined in international law, including the rights to equality, movement, expression, and association, as well as freedom from discrimination.
"The present international consensus supports a two-state solution, which requires a viable, contiguous and fully sovereign Palestinian state, based on the June 1967 boundaries, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and a meaningful transportation link between the West Bank and Gaza," he said.
Negotiations on "the Jerusalem conundrum" must start with the premise that East Jerusalem is Palestinian territory.
He noted that Israeli settlements across East Jerusalem and the West Bank are a "flagrant violation" of international law, according to the United Nations Security Council.
"The settlements would have to be removed, both to comply with international law and to enable a viable and sovereign Palestinian state to emerge," Lynk said.
"Both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to live in security and peace, free from alien rule, terrorism, and threats to their well-being, such as blockades, rockets, and missiles," said Lynk.
