Monday, Jul 01st
Last update06:38:08 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
Israel is using the country's legal system to segregate and penalise its Palestinian citizens and prohibit Arab dissent
Two cases brought before Israeli courts last week revealed the attitude of the establishment towards Palestinian Arab citizens of the state. One shows how Palestinian citizens are treated as victims of police brutality, and the second shows how they are regularly victimised because of their opposition to injustice.
From 2003 to 2006, the Bush administration quietly tried to relax the draft language of a treaty meant to bar and punish "enforced disappearances" so that those overseeing the CIA's secret prison system would not be criminally prosecuted under its provisions, according to former officials and hundreds of pages of documents recently declassified by the State Department.
Ninety percent of casualties brought to Gaza's main hospital during Israel's winter offensive against Hamas were civilians, according to a new book by one of Norway's most famous and controversial physicians, Dr. Mads Gilbert.
The book, scheduled to be published this month under the title "I in Gaza," recounts Gilbert's experiences as a volunteer at Shifa Hospital in Gaza City and focuses on individual stories by patients and medical staff.
Belgium on Friday became the latest European country to offer asylum to a Guantanamo Bay detainee, announcing that it would resettle a captive now at the prison camps who has been cleared of prosecution by a U.S. court.
The announcement follows similar deals between the Obama administration and France and Portugal, which last month took in two Syrians for resettlement. Ireland has also agreed to take two detainees seeking third-country asylum.
By all accounts, the interrogation of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush went terribly wrong. Military guards accused his interrogators of beating the detainee and stuffing his body into a sleeping bag bound with electrical cord until he suffocated.
When it came time for a CIA employee to testify during the court-martial of Army Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer, however, officials went to great lengths to protect the employee's identity, erecting a high, Army-green tarpaulin to shield him from spectators.
Even when there are no Palestinian casualties and fatalities at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, there is no letup in the everyday bullying by the occupation regime. Many Israelis are complicit in every travel restriction and expropriation order, from the cabinet ministers responsible, to the jurists who legitimize and codify, to the officers who implement and the typists and translators. Every soldier who guards a Jewish settlement, every rabbi who serves it and every kindergarten teacher there is partner to the primal act of the established violence that built it on Palestinian land.
TVNL Comment: This article was written by an Israeli reporter in an Israeli newspaper.
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