Raji Sourani

Raji Sourani (راجي الصوراني; born 31 December 1953, Gaza Strip ) is a human rights lawyer and the director of the Palestinian Center for Human Rights.

He was an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience in 1985 and 1988, member of International Commission of Jurists EXCO and IDAL EXCO, and Vice President of the International Federation of Human Rights. He was a recipient of the Robert F Kennedy Human Rights Award in 1991, given each year to an individual whose courageous activism is at the heart of the human rights movement and in the spirit of Robert F. Kennedy's vision and legacy. In 1995, he founded the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights and is its director.

Sourani was active in the cases of Palestinians representing deportation, and in monitoring the conditions of Israeli prisons and detentions. He remains an unreserved critic of human rights violations occurring on both sides of the conflict.

Sourani was selected for the 2003 Oak Institute for Human Rights Fellowship at Colby College in Waterville, Maine. He was denied a permit to exit Gaza to attend a human rights conference in September 2008. Sourani was co-awarded the Right Livelihood Award on September 26, 2013 for "his unwavering dedication to the rule of law and human rights under exceptionally difficult circumstances."

Sourani served “a three-year sentence [1979-1982] imposed by an Israeli court which convicted him of membership in the illegal Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist organization. He was also denied a US entry visa in 2012. Sourani was imprisoned an additional three times, in 1985 and 1986, and held in administrative detention in 1988.

On October 2023, at the onset of the Israel–Hamas war, Sourani was living with his family in the Tel al-Hawa district of Gaza City. On October 22, 2023, Sourani and his family survived bombardments by Israeli airstrikes after his home was destroyed. From his 65 colleagues from the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, two young lawyers were killed. Sourani eventually managed to flee to Paris, where he assessed the role and limits of the international justice system to affect the war devastating Gaza.