Report claims government abuses against anti-disengagement protesters
Dan Izenberg, THE JERUSALEM POST Nov. 1, 2005
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1129540642811&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

"Israel's law enforcement authorities engaged in widespread and systematic
abuses of the civil rights of opponents of disengagement and of due process
in prosecuting those accused of violating the law," claims a new report
released by two right-wing organizations.

The report, entitled "Israeli Government Violations of Disengagement
Opponents' Civil Rights" was published by the Israel Policy Center and
Honenu Legal Defense Association.

According to the authors, attorney Itzhak Bam, Yitzhak Klein and Shmuel
Meidad, "the phenomenon documented in this report did not occur in a vacuum,
were not the acts of rogue cops, rogue prosecutors or rogue judges, but were
the consequence of the policy of Israel's law enforcement and judicial
systems." The authors added that they had not discovered "direct
instructions by the Attorney General, the Minister of Justice or the Supreme
Court to silence legal dissent or beat up people."

However, they charged that "official directives, judgments of the Supreme
Court and public statements by the heads of the legal system" encouraged the
view that "civil and due process rights of opponents of the government's
policy deserved short shrift, and to signal to the police that these rights
might be violated with impunity." The prime culprits in violating the human
rights of the protesters, the report said, were the Attorney General and the
judiciary.

"The state prosecution service and the judiciary chose to see protest
against disengagement as a form of rebellion and authorized harsh measures
against those taking part in it. Police were all but promised immunity from
punishment for violations of the rights of disengagement's opponents, and
accordingly gave those rights little respect."

The report charged that, in its early rulings, the Supreme Court set the
tone for the attitude of the lower courts throughout the disengagement
process by referring to acts of protest as "ideological crimes." It also
accused the courts of "setting aside" the terms of the arrest law by
improperly holding protesters in detention after their arrest. "Pre-trial
detention was imposed not in a few or in exceptional cases, but massively
and systematically," the authors charged, adding that this was done to
intimidate and deter the protesters.

The report included case studies of different types of alleged human rights
violations including extended detentions and police brutality toward minors,
police brutality in other situations, false arrest and violations of
prisoners' rights and of due process, the allegedly unjustified involvement
of the GSS in fighting the protest movement and suppression of legal
dissent.

Klein, one of the report's authors, told The Jerusalem Post the report will
soon be published in Hebrew.