ABSTRACT

This chapter aims to examine the place of human rights in the Oslo peace agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. Despite the central role of human rights violations in the causes and consequences of this conflict, human rights have been virtually absent in the peace agreements between the two sides. The status of human rights in the Palestinian territories in fact deteriorated during the Oslo peace process. The chapter also compares the human rights approach of conflict resolution and the conflict resolution approach underpinning the Oslo peace agreements. It concludes that introducing a human rights paradigm is compatible with the nature of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict as an intrastate and intergroup conflict and that doing so also has distinctive advantages that have been missing in the official conflict resolution approach that has underpinned the Oslo peace process.