London: Seventy-five years after the 1951 Refugee Convention was adopted at a United Nations conference in Geneva, Britain has yet to respond to a landmark legal petition demanding it acknowledge and apologise for its historical role in creating the Palestinian refugee crisis.
The petition, a 400-page legal submission co-authored by Victor Kattan, legal adviser to the Britain Owes Palestine campaign and Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham, argues that Britain acted unlawfully in Palestine between 1917 and 1948. It calls for a parliamentary apology, a search of unreleased archives, a full public response, and serious consideration of reparations.
The Balfour Declaration of 1917 saw Britain promise support for a national home for one people on land inhabited by another, without the consent of the majority living there. For three decades, Britain governed Palestine under what the petition describes as irreconcilable obligations, suppressing Palestinian self-government and at times authorising collective punishment through emergency powers.
In 1948, Britain withdrew, leaving the population without protection. What followed was the Nakba, in which more than 750,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. Their descendants today number in the millions.
The same Refugee Convention Britain helped negotiate further compounded the injustice. Palestinians were excluded from its ordinary protections through Article 1D, which carved them out on the basis that they already received assistance from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). That exclusion was conceived as temporary, pending a political solution assumed to be imminent. Seventy-five years later, it remains in place.
Unlike other refugee populations covered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Palestinians have no access to durable solutions such as voluntary repatriation, local integration, or resettlement.
A cross-party coalition of 45 MPs and peers has urged the prime minister to respond. Ten months after the petition’s submission, the government, now led by Andy Burnham following Keir Starmer’s departure, has said nothing.
Kattan points to precedent. In 2013, Britain acknowledged and settled claims from Kenyan victims of abuses during the Mau Mau uprising. He argues Britain cannot credibly champion international refugee law while refusing to confront its own role in producing the world’s longest-standing refugee crisis.
“Legal obligations do not lapse because they become inconvenient,” Kattan wrote.
