Marginalized in the Depths of Oblivion: Advocate Helmi Al-Zuwaiti’s Poetic Plea for Taha... The Child Who Was Killed Twice

On the occasion of the United Nations’ observance of the International Day of the Victims of Enforced Disappearances on August 30, and in honor of those who have disappeared, and to commemorate voices silenced and taken forcibly from their homes or workplaces, or silenced, erased, or consigned to the depths of oblivion by authority, indifference, or the passage of time, the American magazine *The Pasticheur* issued its new issue on August 1 under the title “Voices That Disappear: On the Disappeared and the Silenced.” This special issue shed light on a number of global creators, writers, poets, and thinkers who advocated for human rights and whose works contributed to exploring the condition of enforced disappearance in all its forms: the missing body, the censored voice, the buried archive, and memory that resists erasure. In this context, the issue included a feature on Dr. Helmi al-Zawati, a poet, international legal scholar, and human rights defender, featuring a portrait of him by the Palestinian visual artist Dr. Shafiq Radwan (1978), as well as his poem “Taha, Lover of the Sea and Olives,” in both Arabic and English, which will be published in *Al-Qabas* in a subsequent issue.

Dr. al-Zawati, born in Nablus in 1953, is a renowned Palestinian poet, playwright, novelist, and a prominent international scholar in international criminal law and human rights. Over the past five decades, he has published a significant number of high-quality books, articles, and legal and literary research works in both Arabic and English. His literary and legal works have been translated into several languages and have been the subject of numerous academic and media studies in the Arab world and internationally. In addition to his literary achievements, Dr. al-Zawati received intensive legal education at several prestigious universities. He holds a Doctor of Civil Law (D.C.L.) in international criminal law and a master’s degree in comparative international law from the world-renowned McGill University, as well as another doctorate in the international political economy of energy from the University of Ottawa (CPU). Thus, his academic and literary accomplishments have established him as a prominent figure in the fields of literature and law, both in the Arab world and globally.

For the past five decades, Dr. al-Zawati has remained a committed human rights defender, actively struggling for the rights of rape victims in times of war around the world since the emergence of the first reports of rape crimes during the breakup of former Yugoslavia (1992–1995). He served as chair of the International Committee for the Defense of Victims of Sexual Violence during Armed Conflicts for two consecutive terms. He is also the current president of the International Center for Justice and Legal Accountability, and the drafter of the proposal to establish the People’s Court for prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence crimes during the Arab Spring, published in the *Tulane Journal of International and Comparative Law* in summer 2022. In this context, Dr. al-Zawati delivered an intervention before the Canadian Parliament on May 1, 2014, highlighting new models of sexual violence used as a weapon in the ongoing civil war in Syria, and calling on the Canadian government to open its doors to victims and to activate Canada’s universal jurisdiction law to prosecute perpetrators of war crimes and crimes against humanity. A few months later, Canada hosted more than 30,000 Syrian refugees. Dr. al-Zawati’s legal contributions and opinions have been cited in many cases before international courts and national courts with universal jurisdiction. Most of these relate to his theory on “the fair classification of crimes and proportionality in international criminal law,” published in a book by Oxford University Press in 2014. Between 2001 and 2010, three of Dr. al-Zawati’s legal books on the theory of jihad in Islamic jurisprudence, on the genocide of humankind in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and on rape and sexual violence during armed conflicts, won the American Adil Malin Prize, and these books remain to this day scientific references studied at major American, Canadian, and European universities.

Notably, Palestine and its ongoing Nakba have dominated most of Dr. al-Zawati’s literary and academic works. His most recent scientific activity was a lecture delivered at the Faculty of Law of Rutgers University in the United States last February, titled “Humanity’s Betrayal: Mechanisms of International Law and Its Failure to Protect Civilians in Gaza.” His latest literary work is his poetry collection “Verses of Blood and Jasmine,” which will be published in English in Montreal on September 1 next.