Holding human rights hostage

By Graham Usher

"The report seriously misrepresents Israel's human rights record," was the verdict of Hanny Megally, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch's (HRW) Middle East and North Africa Division.

HRW's main gripe was Israel's failure to address or claim any responsibility for human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories. Thus, in the report, submitted on 15 July, Israel refers only to those cases of administrative detention (detaining individuals without charge or trial) that occurred under Israeli domestic law. This is to ignore that "almost all of the 1,900 administrative (detention) orders issued in 1997 were authorised under military orders in the Occupied Territories," notes HRW.

HRW also challenged Israel's invocation of the ICCPR's "state of the emergency" clause to justify practices of arbitrary arrest and detention. It argues that Israel often uses prolonged administrative detention against Arab nationals less for "security" reasons than as "hostages" for political negotiations, such as in the recent deal between Israel and Hizbullah where Lebanese detainees were released in exchange for the remains of Israeli soldiers missing in action. To support this view, HRW cites a decision in March 1998 in which Israel's Supreme Court renewed administrative detention orders of some 20 Lebanese nationals after acknowledging that "the detainees were not themselves a threat to state security."

Similar criticisms were voiced by the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories (B'tselem), Israel's premier human rights organisation. In its brief to the committee, it drew attention to Israel's attempts to "legitimise blatantly illegal acts." Despite being a signatory to the International Convention on Torture, Israel "routinely employs interrogation methods that constitute torture," writes B'tselem. More disturbingly, Israel's High Court of Justice has explicitly allowed interrogation methods such as sleep deprivation, hooding and physical force on the grounds of "protecting" the interrogator.

B'tselem's Executive Director Eitan Felner accepts that Israel is hardly alone among states in its use of torture and administrative detention. "What renders Israel's abuses unique throughout the world," he says, "is the relentless efforts to justify what cannot be justified."

These efforts are likely to continue, at least as far as Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are concerned. The only area in the report where Israel admitted some guilt was in its racist treatment of the million or so Palestinian citizens of Israel. For the first time, an Israeli government admitted that Israeli Arabs are subject to discrimination in education, housing and employment. It said the causes of this discrimination lay in the Arab-Israeli conflict.

The committee is expected to announce its conclusions on Israel's report at the end of July. It has no power to impose sanctions.