Palestinian human rights group deplores Swiss funding freeze
The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) has spoken out against the recent suspension of Swiss aid to 11 Palestinian and Israeli NGOs.
“This is a dangerous decision,” said ICHR Director General Anmar al-Dwaik on Friday. “We are very worried” and “we are very disappointed” by this move by the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs (FDFA), he told correspondents accredited to the UN in Geneva. The ICHR itself receives funding from the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), but is not affected by this decision.
+ Why Switzerland has frozen funding to 11 Middle East NGOs
The national human rights institution in Palestine also deplores the publication of the list of NGOs online by the Swiss authorities, before it was later withdrawn. These organisations, both Israeli and Palestinian, which work on the Palestinian question, have for several years been the victims of campaigns of denigration and restrictions by the Hebrew state,” says al-Dwaik. He called on Switzerland to reconsider this decision.
The ICHR is worried about its twenty or so staff in the Gaza Strip. Most of them have lost their homes and are among the nearly 1.5 million internally displaced persons. The organisation has lost track of some of them in recent days.
This news story has been written and carefully fact-checked by an external editorial team. At SWI swissinfo.ch we select the most relevant news for an international audience and use automatic translation tools such as DeepL to translate it into English. Providing you with automatically translated news gives us the time to write more in-depth articles. You can find them here.
If you want to know more about how we work, have a look here, and if you have feedback on this news story please write to english@swissinfo.ch.
In compliance with the JTI standards
More: SWI swissinfo.ch certified by the Journalism Trust Initiative
You can find an overview of ongoing debates with our journalists here . Please join us!
If you want to start a conversation about a topic raised in this article or want to report factual errors, email us at english@swissinfo.ch.