Victor Kattan

About/Bio

Victor Kattan is Assistant Professor in Public International Law at the University of Nottingham School of Law where he is the deputy director of the Nottingham International Law and Security Centre. He is also a legal adviser to the Britain Owes Palestine campaign, which is seeking an apology and reparations from the British Government for breaches of international law in Palestine when Britain was the mandatory power. Victor's publications include: The Palestine Question in International Law (British Institute of International and Comparative Law, 2008); From Coexistence to Conquest: International Law and the Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1891-1949 (Pluto Press, 2009); Violent Radical Movements in the Arab World: The Ideology and Politics of NonState Actors (Bloomsbury, 2019, with Peter Sluglett); Making Endless War: The Vietnam and Arab-Israeli Conflicts in the History of International Law (Michigan University Press, 2023, with Brian Cuddy); and The Breakup of India and Palestine: The Causes and Legacies of Partition (Manchester University Press, 2023, with Amit Ranjan). Victor is currently writing a monograph on apartheid as a crime against humanity for Oxford University Press.

Recently Published

EJIL: The Podcast! Episode 40: Palestinian Legal Frontiers: SC Res 2803 and beyond

Palestine and the Palestinians are often the subjects of conversations in the news, on blogs and in judicial opinions, but not present in conversations themselves. The issues are treated episodically in connection with dramatic events or judicial processes or UN resolutions, and these can entrench an atomization of attention into the atrocities committed in the Israeli-occupied territories of…

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Apartheid as a form of genocide: Reflections on South Africa v Israel  

On 12 December 2023, Mathu Joyini, South Africa’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, told the 10th Emergency Special Session of the United Nations General Assembly, that the large-scale Israeli military operation in Gaza, following the 7 October attacks, had ‘illustrated that Israel is acting contrary to its obligations in terms of the Genocide Convention’. She added that,…

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The Crime of Apartheid beyond Southern Africa: A Call to Revive the Apartheid Convention’s “Group of Three”

The International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (the “Apartheid Convention”) is a much understudied and overlooked human rights treaty. This is surprising given how often apartheid is mentioned in public discourse. The Apartheid Convention was adopted by the UN General Assembly on 30 November 1973, and entered into force on…

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