Founders

Mr. Abdalla Sharafeddin was an international lawyer who earned his degree in law and economics at the University of Cairo in Egypt. He then served as the Head of Consular Affairs at the Libyan Ministry of Foreign Affairs. From 1968 to 1978, Mr. Sharafeddin was President of the Libyan Bar Association and Lawyers Syndicate.

Mr. Sharfeddin had numerous publications and was the Editor-in-Chief of Al-Ayam Newspaper and the Lawyer’s Journal. He was a founding member on the boards of various national, regional, and international bodies among them the Social Reform Association, Labor Unions, the Parliament and State Legislative Council, Arab Organization for Human Rights, Union of Arab Jurists, Arab Lawyers Union, Special Committee to amend the Charter of the Arab League, and International Center for Peace. In 1976, Mr. Sharafeddin co-founded and became President of the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD), an international nongovernmental organization headquartered in Geneva with consultative status in the United Nations.

Since the mid-1940s, when his struggle for justice and human rights began, he withstood for decades, the ravages of political imprisonment, persecution, and exile, and in the 1980s survived physical liquidation by the former Libyan regime, which also illegally seized all of Mr. Sharafeddin’s private properties. He passed away on 25 March 2018 in Egypt.

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Dr. Anis Al-Qasem, Former Secretary-General of the International Organization for the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD), was born in Palestine and educated at the Arab College in Jerusalem and later at King’s College in U.K, where he attained both his LL.M. and Ph.D. from the University of London in 1969.

As a law professor and constitutional lawyer, Dr. Al-Qasem led the drafting of the Palestinian Interim Constitution and Basic Law. He was a member of the Steering Committee for the Palestinian delegation to the 1991 Madrid conference. In the early 1990s, editor of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law in Amman. After 1993, Dr. Al-Qasem was the main force behind drafting the PA’s Basic Law for the transitional period. He returned to Palestine for the first time in 1994 to present his draft; worked as a barrister in London in the second half of the 1990s. Also, Board of Trustees member of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza. Dr. Al-Qasem continued to serve in his capacity as President of the Legal Committee of the Palestinian National Council until he resigned in protest against the amendment of the PLO Charter in 1998.

He was the author of more than 15 books and numerous articles in Arabic and English, among his works are The Meaning of Freedom for the Arab World (1954), We, the Vatican and Israel (1966). He passed away on 7 January 2021 in Spain.

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