Situations of contested sovereignty and prolonged occupations may be the object of persistent civil society campaigns which make ample reference to international law. In essence, the legal strategies adopted by civil society organizations revolve around three categories of legal arguments: a) unlawfulness of territorial control; b) breaches of human rights law, humanitarian law and commission of international crimes; c) unlawfulness of the circulation of the products of the territory. The relevant legal norms range from the principle of self-determination to the prohibition of settlements in the occupied territory and, again, from the regulation of the exploitation of natural resources to the duty of non-recognition of unlawful territorial situations. Against this background, this paper will compare the legal strategies of civil society campaigns and their impact on the policies adopted by the EU with relation to two unresolved situations of contested sovereignty: Western Sahara/Morocco and Palestine/Israel. Under a legal perspective, both cases share some similarities, but - as will be seen - the legal strategies adopted by the relevant actors are different. The analysis will focus on the campaigns organized by Western Sahara Resource Watch and by the BDS movement underlining their possible impact on the circulation of the products of the occupied territories. As a self-proclaimed ethical actor with significant trade interests in the concerned regions, the EU is a natural interlocutor of these campaigns. The debates on the importat and the labelling of goods originating from Western Sahara and the Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories will be thus considered in parallel. In this respect, the paper will assess from a legal standpoint the position of the EU and its member States, on the one hand, and the demands of grassroots movements, on the other. In the end, the paper will try to explain some of the reasons for the adoption of different legal strategies in similar cases.
