The Palestinian cause lost one of its most active defenders before international judicial bodies. Gilles Devers, a lawyer from Lyon who helped bring this issue before the International Criminal Court (ICC), died on November 26 at the age of 68, after a long battle with illness. His death came five days after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, for war crimes and crimes against humanity.
Since 2009, Devers had filed dozens of reports with the Court’s prosecutor’s office on behalf of Palestinian victims. His son, Manuel Devers, made it clear on Tuesday that he would continue with the cases initiated by his father. “We’re going to continue,” he said. “We’ve been together on all the files, at the European Union, on the Sahara, on Palestine.”
Gilles Devers, a nurse by training who went into law late in life, took up the Palestinian issue in early 2009, at a time when nobody believed that such a case could ever end up before the ICC. “At the first meeting at the Palestinian embassy in Paris in 2009, I was considered the biggest boy scout and the biggest idiot,” he said with characteristic humor and modesty when contacted by Le Monde just after the warrants were issued.
‘An army of lawyers for a country without an army’
The lawyer was commissioned by various groups of Gaza victims, including doctors and fishermen. By 2018, he had compiled “more than 3,000 files” on behalf of Palestinians injured, mutilated or killed in the Israeli army’s repression of the “return marches” organized that year in the enclave. Devers was also counsel for Hamas, which he convinced in 2014 to support the accession of the State of Palestine to the International Criminal Court. Devers was also a lawyer for the Polisario Front, and in early October landed a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Luxembourg, invalidating two trade agreements between Morocco and the EU.
On the subject of Palestine, Devers used to say that he wanted to “raise an army of lawyers, for a country without an army.” He gathered several hundred of them to support the proceedings in favor of Palestine at the ICC. “He left just after winning his two biggest battles,” said his son, referring to the ICC indictment of Netanyahu and Gallant and the recent CJEU ruling.
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