The Palestinian Return Center

The Palestinian Return Centre is an independent academic/media consultancy founded and registered in the United Kingdom in 1996. It specializes in the research, analysis, and monitor of issues pertaining to the dispersed Palestinians and their right to return. It also serves as an information repository on other related aspects of the Palestine Question and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Origins: There is a popular sentiment among the Palestinian, as well as Arab public, that the Israeli-Palestinian Accords (Oslo-Cairo) failed to recognize or guarantee the basic rights of the Palestinian people. Foremost among these rights are: the right to return and self-determination, the right of sovereignty over Jerusalem, and the right to establish an independent Palestinian state with all the necessary instruments and organs of sovereignty. Worse still, Israel's continued expansion of settlements in the territories that it illegally occupies has added insult to the injury caused by the denial and violation of these rights. The ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began more than sixty years ago has turned the overwhelming majority of Palestinian people into refugees. There are about five million Palestinians who are presently denied the right to return to their homes. Most of them live in 58 camps scattered throughout the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. Hundreds of thousands more are exiled in the Americas, Europe and Australia. That none of them can return except by the expressed permission of Israel is a flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) since "Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.