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Irish lawyer Blaine Ní Gralay stood before the International Court of Justice on January 11, accusing Israel of committing genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza.
The lawyer advising the South African legal team said in her lawsuit that the international community is failing the Palestinians, who are broadcasting their tragedy live in front of the world, with a feeling of weak hope that verges on despair that the world will take action to stop the aggression against them. “There is no one,” she said. Safe in Gaza.
A life-changing book
After long moves and trips in Ireland, the Gralay family eventually settled in London. Gralay was still a little girl, raised by her mother, along with her older sister, whom she described as her “rock” in life.
She loved reading at an early age, and one time when she was 12 years old, she pulled out a book from her mother’s library with a picture of a girl the same age on its cover.
Gralay read the book from cover to cover, and burst into tears. The book told the story of the murder of an Irish girl, Majella O’Hare, at the hands of a British soldier, who shot her in the back in Northern Ireland in 1976, while she was walking near an army checkpoint. Majella died in her father’s arms after he heard the shot and ran to her.
The little girl did not understand the heinousness of the event. She ran to her mother crying and asked her, “How could such a terrible thing happen?” Her mother replied? “Do something about this.”
In the footsteps
“Do something about this.” Perhaps those were the magic words that shaped Gralay’s future and life. The words stuck in her mind and touched a deep, sensitive chord in her soul.
During her teenage years in London, she would go on holidays to courtrooms to watch criminal trials. “When I was about 13 or 14, I used to take myself to the Old Bailey – the central criminal court in England and Wales,” Gralay told Irish Legal News. “In the school holidays, I found it great.”
However, Gralay never saw herself as a lawyer, nor did she ever plan to be one. “I didn’t always want to be a lawyer. I never imagined myself in that role until much later.”
But those around her knew that one day she would be a lawyer. “I can’t say it was a surprise to anyone when I became a lawyer. I never avoided any discussion or controversy. But this would not have occurred to me when I was young, maybe because I didn’t know “No lawyers in my life. We had a lot of teachers in the family but no lawyers.”
Gralay did not plan to study law. Instead, she decided to major in languages at Queen’s College, Cambridge, choosing to study French and Latin, but it seemed that she was destined to become that lawyer who stands before the International Court of Justice in an attempt to achieve justice for the Palestinians. It later became clear to her that French and Latin were the languages of international law, so she decided to give up studying it.
Gralay worked for a few years at a US-based think tank to save money to study law. After that, she volunteered at an NGO, then got a job as a paralegal at a human rights firm in London, and continued to work there part-time while she studied law.
In a surprise that changed her entire career path, she was offered a position to work as a legal observer in the investigation of the events of “Bloody Sunday” 1972, in the Derry region of Northern Ireland, in which 14 were killed in a demonstration against the preventive detention law that the British authorities decided to apply to Irish activists. Gralay agreed to show and moved from London to Derry, where she spent a year as a legal observer and another year working in a law firm representing many of the families of those killed and injured on Bloody Sunday.
On the right side of history
The “Bloody Sunday” investigation had a major impact on Gralay’s life, after which she returned to London and resumed her studies in law, this time deciding to specialize in human rights and international law.
Gralay moved from one case to another, most of them affecting human rights, freedom of expression, and peaceful protest. Two years ago, she, along with other lawyers, obtained an acquittal for 4 defendants accused of vandalizing the statue of the British slave trader Edward Colston and throwing it into the Avon River in England during a Black Lives Matter march in 2020.
In the case known as “Bristol 4,” Gralay and her legal team argued that displaying and celebrating the bronze statue of the slaver, who is responsible for the enslavement of about 84,000 black people and the killing of 20,000 people, is a criminal attack in itself, and that the citizens of Bristol agree to remove the statue. In her closing words in that case, she urged the jury to be “on the right side of history.”
A wounded child…no family alive
For years, Gralay kept Magella O’Hare’s book framed and placed on her desk, and in moments of contemplation she realized that the suffering of the Palestinians was familiar to the Irish, that their struggle was the same, that the British killed children and Israel did too.
On December 29, 2023, South Africa filed an 84-page lawsuit before the International Court of Justice in The Hague accusing Israel of committing acts of genocide against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. It formed a team of law professors, members of human rights organizations, and lawyers specializing in international law and human rights. They were joined by Irish lawyer Blaine Ní Gralay, who previously stood before the International Court of Justice in the case of genocide between Croatia and Serbia, according to the Irish Examiner.
Despite its defense of rights and struggle in various countries, Palestine had another impact.
In 2009, Gralay participated in a UN-mandated legal monitoring mission in Gaza following the 2008 Israeli military invasion, known as Operation Cast Lead that left about 1,500 martyrs. “It was one of the experiences of my professional life that influenced me the most,” she said. Other”.
When her mother died in 2011, the family asked for donations to the Palestine Solidarity Campaign instead of placing flowers on her grave.
On January 11, Gralay stood before the International Court of Justice and delivered her final statement. She said, “Based on current figures, an average of 247 Palestinians are killed and at risk of being killed every day, many of whom are literally torn to pieces, including 48 mothers every day.” One day, two every hour and more than 117 children every day.”
She continued, “Every day, more than 10 Palestinian children will have one or both legs amputated, many without anesthesia. More mass graves will be dug, and more cemeteries will be bulldozed and bombed, depriving even the dead of any dignity or peace.”
Gralay added that what is happening in Gaza at the hands of the Israelis is “the first genocide in modern history,” and that this genocide produced a new and terrible acronym, which is (WCNSF), meaning “a wounded child, with no family alive to care for him.”
Gralay said, “The international community continues to fail the Palestinian people and strip them of their humanity despite their exposure to genocide. Despite the horror of the genocide to which the Palestinian people are subjected, its victims broadcast their killing and destruction live while feeling little and desperate hope that the world might do something.”
