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richard falk
'National Security Threat'? 95-Year-Old Human Rights Scholar Richard Falk Interrogated for Hours by Canada
"Clearly, the international repression of the Palestinian cause knows no bounds."
Nov 15, 2025
Ninety-five-year-old Richard Falk—world renowned scholar of international law and former UN special rapporteur focused on Palestinian rights—was detained and interrogated for several hours along with his wife, legal scholar Hilal Elver, as the pair entered Canada for a conference focused on that nation's complicity with Israel's genocide in Gaza.
"A security person came and said, ‘We’ve detained you both because we’re concerned that you pose a national security threat to Canada,'” Falk explained to Al-Jazeera in a Saturday interview from Ottawa in the wake of the incident that happened at the international airport in Toronto ahead of the scheduled event.
“It was my first experience of this sort–ever–in my life,” said Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, author or editor of more than 20 books, and formerly the UN special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories.
Falk, who is American, has been an outspoken critic of the foreign policy of Canada, the United States, and other Western nations on the subject of Israel-Palestine as well as other issues. He told media outlets that he and his wife, also an American, were held for over four hours after their arrival in Toronto. They were in the country to speak and participate at the Palestine Tribunal on Canadian Responsibility, an event scheduled for Friday and Saturday in Ottawa, the nation's capital.
The event, according to the program notes on the website, was designed to "document the multiple ways that Canadian entities – including government bodies, corporations, universities, charities, media, and other cultural institutions–have enabled and continue to enable the settler colonization and genocide of Palestinians, and to articulate what justice and reparations would require."
In his comments to Al-Jazeera, Falk said he believes the interrogation by the Canadian authorities—which he described as "nothing particularly aggressive" but "random" and "disorganized" in its execution—is part of a global effort by powerful nations complicit with human rights abuses and violations of international law to “punish those who endeavour to tell the truth about what is happening” in the world, including in Gaza.
Martin Shaw, a British sociologist and author of The New Age of Genocide, said the treatment of Falk and Elver should be seen as an "extraordinary development" for Canada, and not in a good way. For a nation that likes to think of itself as a "supporter of international justice," said Shaw, "to arrest the veteran scholar and former UN rapporteur Richard Falk while he is attending a Gaza tribunal. Clearly, the international repression of the Palestinian cause knows no bounds."
Canadian Senator Yuen Pau Woo, a supporter of the Palestine Tribunal, told Al-Jazeera he was “appalled” by the interrogation.
“We know they were here to attend the Palestine Tribunal. We know they have been outspoken in documenting and publicizing the horrors inflicted on Gaza by Israel, and advocating for justice,” Woo said. “If those are the factums for their detention, then it suggests that the Canadian government considers these acts of seeking justice for Palestine to be national security threats–and I’d like to know why.”
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'Jury of Conscience' Finds 'Israel Is Perpetrating Ongoing Genocide' in Gaza
The Gaza Tribunal's final statement calls for legal accountability, suspension of Israel from global groups, and activation of a veto-proof UN mechanism for international intervention to stop the genocide.
Oct 27, 2025
A civil society panel assembled in response to Israel's annihilation and starvation of Gaza delivered its final statement Sunday in Istanbul—detailing nine categories of crimes committed, warning that genocide continues, and calling on humanity to take action to hold the perpetrators legally and morally accountable.
Chaired by Richard Falk, a former United Nations special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and a professor emeritus at Princeton University in New Jersey, the Gaza Tribunal held four days of public hearings during which international jurists, experts, and witnesses offered evidence and testimonies of what they said are Israel's continuing crimes against the Palestinian people.
Israel "is perpetrating an ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza, within—and enabled by—a broader settler-colonial apartheid regime rooted in the supremacist ideology of Zionism," said Christine Chinkin, a University of Michigan law professor who chaired the tribunal's Jury of Conscience.
"The jury, guided by conscience and informed by international law, does not speak with the authority of states, but when law is silenced by power, conscience must become the final tribunal," she continued. "We believe that genocide must be named and documented and that impunity feeds continuing violence throughout the globe."
"Genocide in Gaza is the concern of all humanity," Chinkin added. "When states are silent civil society can and must speak out."
The jury named—and condemned—Israel's crimes in Gaza, including:
- Starvation and famine via the deliberate and systematic destruction of Gaza's food and water system;
- Domicide, including the intentional mass destruction of homes and their infrastructure such as electricity, water, and sanitation;
- Ecocide, the catastrophic obliteration of sources of food and water, land fertility, and air quality;
- Deliberate destruction of Gaza's healthcare infrastructure;
- Reprocide, or the intentional and systematic targeting of reproductive care through prevention of births, eliminating future lives, and the ability to reproduce safely;
- Scholasticide, the "genocide of knowledge" via the destruction of educational institutions and infrastructure and killing of and forcibly displacing educators and students;
- Attacks on journalists—well over 200 of whom have been killed since October 2023—in order to thwart genocide documentation;
- Torture and sexual violence; and
- Politicide—the targeted assassination and abduction of political and cultural leaders, representatives, activists, and the destruction of civic institutions.
Additionally, the jury "finds Western governments, particularly the United States, and others complicit in, in some cases colluding with, Israel’s commission of genocide through provision of diplomatic cover, weapons, weapon parts, intelligence, military assistance and training, and continuing economic relations," Chinkin said.
The panel called for "ending impunity and ensuring accountability" by using legal institutions such as the International Court of Justice—which is currently weighing a genocide case against Israel filed by South Africa—and the International Criminal Court, which last year issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defense Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza including murder and forced starvation.
The jury also urged UN member states to invoke the United for Peace resolution adopted by the UN General Assembly (UNGA) in 1950. The measure is designed to empower action when at least one of the five permanent Security Council members uses a veto to thwart functions mandated under the UN Charter.
The resolution—which has been implemented more than a dozen times—allows the UNGA to take actions ranging from rejecting Israel’s UN credentials to mandating an armed protection force for Gaza, if approved by two-thirds of UN member states.
The jury further recommended "resisting and dismantling oppressive structures" by "building a worldwide movement that weakens, isolates, and dismantles each source through coordinated political, legal, economic, academic, cultural, technological, and social action."
It also called for "comprehensive global confrontation" of Israel "in every sphere—political and diplomatic; legal and human rights; economic and commercial; media, cultural, intellectual, academic, and educational; industrial, technological, and scientific; arts, tourism, and sports."
"Silence is not neutral; silence is complicity," Chinkin concluded, adding that "neutrality is surrender to evil."
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'Horrifying' Footage Shows IDF Killing Two Gazans, Burying Their Bodies With a Bulldozer
"When the Israeli army can do these things and get away with it, it can only then do more of it knowing that it will not meet any punishment," said one analyst.
Mar 28, 2024
Video footage broadcast Wednesday by Al Jazeera shows Israeli soldiers gunning down two Palestinians on the coast of northern Gaza, even as one of them waves what appears to be a piece of white fabric.
The footage shows one of the men walking in the direction of an Israeli military vehicle with both hands raised. Despite the absence of any clear evidence that the man posed a threat, Israeli forces shot him from a short distance away. Another man is seen on the ground not far behind.
Al Jazeera's Tareq Abu Azzoum said the killings took place near where World Central Kitchen recently dropped off food aid.
The video then shows Israeli soldiers burying the bodies with a bulldozer.
"Probably certain words should be invented for this sort of thing," Marwan Bishara, AI Jazeera's chief political analyst, said in response to the footage. "I am not sure we have the sufficient vocabulary to describe this sort of twilight zone of Israel's fantasy of being the world's most moral army."
"It's a fantasy that meets the reality of a genocide," Bishara added. "An attempt to kill or destroy much of Palestine and Palestinians and hide the evidence and lie about it. When the Israeli army can do these things and get away with it, it can only then do more of it knowing that it will not meet any punishment."
Watch:
مشاهد حصرية للجزيرة لإعدام جنود إسرائيليين مدنيين فلسطينيين أثناء محاولتهم العودة لشمال قطاع غزة#الأخبار #حرب_غزة pic.twitter.com/QER98mv2n6
— قناة الجزيرة (@AJArabic) March 27, 2024
Richard Falk, former United Nations special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, told Al Jazeera that the footage provides "vivid confirmation of continuing Israeli atrocities" and spotlights the "unambiguous character of Israeli atrocities that are being carried out on a daily basis."
"The eyes and ears of the world have been assaulted in real-time by this form of genocidal behavior," said Falk. "It is a shocking reality that there has been no adverse reaction from the liberal democracies in the West. It is a shameful moment."
The Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, whose board Falk chairs, has documented numerous examples of Israeli soldiers conducting close-range field executions in Gaza since October 7, when Israel launched its latest assault following a Hamas-led attack.
In less than six months, Israeli forces have killed more than 32,500 people in Gaza and sparked one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in modern history.
The video footage emerged just days after the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The U.S., Israel's leading arms supplier, abstained from the vote and falsely claimed the measure was "nonbinding."
The Israeli government, for its part, immediately signaled that it would disregard the resolution, just as it has ignored orders from the International Court of Justice.
Sophie McNeill, a human rights campaigner, called the footage released Wednesday "horrifying" and demanded that the International Criminal Court "urgently prioritize investigating and charging all those carrying out war crimes in Gaza."
"There just so happened to be a camera here in this moment. What are we not seeing?" McNeill asked. "This impunity must end."
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