Ireland will recognise a Palestinian state, Prime Minister Simon Harris said on Wednesday, adding that he expected other countries to follow in the coming weeks after talking to world leaders.
“Today, Ireland, Norway, and Spain are announcing that we recognise the state of Palestine,” Harris said at a press conference.
“In the lead up to today’s announcement, I’ve spoken with a number of other leaders and counterparts and I’m confident that further countries will join us in taking this important step in the coming weeks,” he added.
There was quite a bit of speculation that we would do the formal recognition yesterday and I suppose this announcement is essentially it as nothing will stop it.
I wonder if the extra few days before formal recognition is to allow some on the fence to join in / possibly to allow for the slow wheels of bureaucracy to turn. I’m not sure what legal steps have to be taken to formally recognise a country. I don’t suppose it happens very often.
It’s no surprise to me that they’ve recalled their ambassador. Quite a few opposition politicians here have been calling for the expulsion anyway so it seemed like an inevitability.
There’s a fair bit of work. The biggest obstacle is all the random form entries that need to be modified. It’s not like it’s a single central table, it’s the same table copy and pasted a million times. Then for most countries you’d need to add recognition of their passports, their national ID’s, update legislation on whether nationals of that state are afforded certain protections or not certain visa requirements or not, etc. It truly can take years.
In most cases one country becomes two or two become one. In the first case everyone can use the old country on forms and the old country’s rules apply to everyone until changed. In the second case you can use the country your passport was issued from or both or whatever. But there is less of a change.
For Palestine, it’s just poofing into existence. They don’t get passports. They don’t have any existing relations. So I imagine this announcement will take a while to be formalized fully but there will be some interim order that basically says what you need to do manually if you encounter a Palestinian and your automated systems can’t process it.
That’s very informative and all makes sense. Thank you.