UN Committee Against Torture Releases List of Issues for Israel

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UN Committee Against Torture Releases List of Issues for Israel

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following press release was issued by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel on 18 July 2012 in response to the UN Committee Against Torture`s publication of a list of issues to be addressed by Israel. An Israeli response to these issues must be submitted by December 2013.]  

37 of 59 Questions Regarding Israel’s Compliance with the Convention Against Torture Relate to Issues Raised in NGO Report

In June 2012, the United Nations Committee Against Torture (CAT) posed 59 questions to Israel regarding its compliance with the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Israel ratified this convention in 1991.

Adalah, Al Mezan, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel submitted a joint report to CAT on Israel’s non-compliance with the convention in order to call the expert members of the Committee attention to Israel`s use of torture. 37 of the CAT’s 59 questions for Israel related directly to issues that the NGOs raised in the joint report, including failure to make torture a crime as defined in the Convention, detention without trial including administrative detention and those classified as “Unlawful Combatants,” harsh detention conditions such as solitary confinement, mistreatment of asylum seekers, insufficient investigation into torture complaints, exceptions to excluding unlawfully obtained evidence in prosecution, severe restrictions on movement preventing access to healthcare and family life for Palestinians in Gaza, lack of adequate investigation into violations during Operation Cast Lead, and punitive home demolitions.

Among the 59 issues highlighted by CAT as conducive to or indicative of torture in contravention to the Convention Against Torture, are:

  1. Prevailing torture and other ill-treatment of Palestinians, in particular by Israel Security Agency, with total impunity
  2. Israel has failed to effectively criminalize torture in its penal law. The Committee asks of Israel: "Please provide information on any steps taken by the State party to amend its legislation and incorporate a crime of torture…"
  3. Israel continues to effectively apply the "necessity defense" as means to legitimate torture. The Committee asks of Israel: "Please also provide detailed information on the number of Palestinian detainees interrogated since 2002 under the “ticking time-bomb” exception…"
  4. Israel fails to effectively investigate complaints submitted on torture and ill treatment. The Committee asks of Israel:  "Please indicate how many of around 700 complaints of alleged torture or ill-treatment during ISA interrogation have been properly and impartially investigated."
  5. The Committee notes that Israel fails to provide for effective forensic documentation of complaints of torture and fails to provide for video or audio recordings of security interrogations.
  6. The Committee notes that Israel continues to refuse to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, thus failing to institutionalize a National (Torture) Prevention Mechanism which would allow for unfettered access to places of detention and interrogation. The Committee asks of Israel: "Please also indicate whether the Government has considered ratifying the Optional Protocol to the Convention.”

The Committee also raised additional issues under Article 16, which states that “Each State Party shall undertake to prevent in any territory under its jurisdiction other acts of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment which do not amount to torture as defined in article I, when such acts are committed by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity.” Here the Committee posed questions on checkpoints in the West Bank, the denial of medical permits for Gazans seeking treatment outside of and unavailable in Gaza, and “continued restrictions which prevent Palestinians from Gaza from living with spouses from the West Bank or Israel, or Palestinians from the West Bank from living with spouses from Jerusalem or Israel.”   

Adalah, Al Mezan, Physicians For Human Rights – Israel and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel call on Israel to provide a detailed response to the questions posed by CAT and to fully comply with its international human rights legal obligations.

[Click here to download the CAT`s complete list of questions for Israel, originally released on 1 June 2012.]

[Click here to download the complete joint report issued by Adalah, Al Mezan, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel, and the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, originally released on 26 March 2012.] 

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412