‘Singles Out Palestinians For Execution’, ‘Risks Breaching Ban on Torture’: Experts on Israel's New Law
New Delhi: Israel's new law imposing the death penalty for terrorist acts “effectively singles out Palestinians for execution” and risks violations of the ban on torture in international law, UN-appointed experts have warned, calling on the country's parliament to repeal the law and on its top court to strike it down.
Last week Israel's 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, passed the contentious Bill with 62 votes in favour.
On the one hand the law requires the death penalty to be handed out in military courts in the Israeli-occupied West Bank for killings deemed to be terrorism. Only Palestinians are tried in these courts and per the legislation judges can commute the sentence to life imprisonment only in unspecified ‘special circumstances’.
In Israeli criminal courts on the other hand, the law allows for the death penalty or life imprisonment to be awarded to someone who commits murder “with the aim of negating the existence of the state of Israel”.
As a result, the Haaretz newspaper notes, “the Bill's wording creates a distinction designating it almost exclusively for Palestinian terror, while the ideological burden of proof it sets is expected to make its application to Jewish nationalist terror nearly impossible”.
In one statement, a group of special rapporteurs – i.e. independent experts appointed by the UN Human Rights Council – condemned the new law, called for its repeal and said it “manifestly violates Israel's obligations under international human rights law”.
“This law marks a grave escalation in Israel’s discriminatory oppression of Palestinians,” special rapporteurs Morris Tidball-Binz, Francesca Albanese, Ben Saul and Reem Alsalem said, adding that a “death penalty regime that is discriminatory in purpose, design or effect is incompatible with the rights to life and equality before the law”.
Such a law also “effectively singles out Palestinians for execution” and “conveys that Palestinian lives are less worthy of legal protection”, they said.
They also pointed to the broader setting within which the law would operate: “In the context of unlawful occupation and a wider system of racial segregation and apartheid, arbitrary detention, torture, deaths in custody and unlawful killings, the enactment of an official threat of execution is itself a form of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and heightens the risk of arbitrary deprivation of life.”
The experts also called on the Israeli Supreme Court to invalidate the law soon.
Another UN special rapporteur Alice Jill Edwards, whose area of work is torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, warned that the new law carries the risk of enabling violations of international law's ban on torture.
“In systems where allegations of torture and ill-treatment in detention and during interrogation have been widely documented, the introduction or expansion of the death penalty carries an acute and irreversible risk. It forecloses the possibility of remedy in cases where convictions may have been secured through coercion or abuse,” the expert said.
B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, has said that military courts in the Israeli-occupied West Bank have a 96% conviction rate that is “based largely on 'confessions' extracted under duress and torture during interrogations”.
Even though some parts of the legislation were modified before being passed last Monday, the Times of Israel has reported that representatives from the country's attorney general's office, the Shin Bet agency, the foreign ministry and the justice ministry still expressed opposition to the Bill.
A particular champion of the Bill is Israel's far-right national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir.
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