Venue: The Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, South Kensington, London SW7 2AR
Tickets: £15*

Esteemed human rights lawyer and Director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, Raji Sourani, will deliver the Edward W. Said London Lecture 2024 examining the current war on Gaza and its implication on International Humanitarian Law (IHL). By examining the legal principles of IHL, Sourani confronts the ramifications of Israel’s action on the integrity of this legal framework. Sourani will deliver the lecture alongside respondent Selma Dabbagh.

Raji Sourani (Gaza, 1953) is a human rights lawyer who has dedicated his career to defending the rights of Palestinians and to the promotion and protection of human rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. He is the co-founder and director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR), which has worked since 1995 to document the impacts of the Israeli occupation. Since October 2023, all three offices of the human rights centre in the Strip have been destroyed. Sourani fled Gaza in late 2023 when his home was bombed. He and his family are currently based in Cairo. Sourani is a member of the South African delegation on the genocide case against Israel before the U.N. International Court of Justice (ICJ).

Sourani has been an active lawyer since 1977, representing a wide variety of victims of human rights abuses. He received many honours in his career, most recent of which was the Right Livelihood Award, Stockholm (2013); the Knight of France’s National Order of Merit, France (2021) and the Honorary Human Rights Award (2022) by the Association for Human Rights for Spain (The Asociación Pro Derechos Humanos de España- APDHE). In 2022, he was appointed as an Arbitrator of the International Permanent Court of Arbitration in the Netherlands. In addition, Raji has been recipient of the Joint Laureate for Robert F Kennedy Memorial for Human Rights (1991) (jointly held with Israeli lawyer, Avigdor Feldman), Washington; the France Republic Human Rights Award from President Jacques Chirac, Paris (1995); the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Outstanding Achievements in the field of Human Rights, Vienna (2002); and the International Service Human Rights Award, London (2003).

Selma Dabbagh Is a British-Palestinian writer and lawyer. A UK qualified solicitor, she holds an LLM from SOAS and has worked for human rights organisations and law firms in Jerusalem, Cairo and London. In recent years she worked to establish the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians (ICJP) as its COO and is currently establishing the Palestine Justice Fund (PJF) a British strategic re-granter (foundation) with political change for Palestinians as its focus. 

Selma writes both fiction and non-fiction. Her debut novel Out of It (Bloomsbury, BQFP, 2011) set between Gaza, London and the Gulf was listed as a best book on Israel/Palestine by The Guardian in 2024. Her fiction includes short stories, radio plays for the BBC and WDR (Germany) as well as productions for stage and screen. She is the editor of We Wrote In Symbols; Love and Lust by Arab Women Writers (Saqi, 2021). Since October 2023 she has been writing a series of blogs for the London Review of Books on Gaza. She holds a PhD from Goldsmiths University. 

The annual Edward W. Said London Lecture series is supported byThe Mosaic Rooms/A. M. Qattan Foundation and London Review of Books.  Find out more about the series and previous speakers here.

The lecture theatre at RGS is equipped with a hearing loop. Rows A-F have the strongest signal. Please email us to reserve seats in rows A-F.

We have a limited number of free tickets available for those who find the ticket price to be a barrier and would otherwise not be able to attend this year’s lecture. Please email us to request a free ticket.

* Concession tickets are available for recipients of universal or pension credit, students (with valid student ID) and under-16s. Tickets are non-refundable.