Editor’s Note: This is a story that is not new to advocates and activists for Palestine, but despite all the efforts by Australian lawyer Gerard Horton during his five years at Defence for Children, International, to bring the shocking details of violations against children in Israeli prisons out into the open, the mainstream media has kept a stony silence. That is, until Saturday when senior journalist John Lyons from The Australian – not known for its sympathy to the varied and sustained human rights abuses endured by Palestinians – wrote a piece exposing the truth on Palestinian children in Israeli prisons. It is always difficult to read about how any criminal justice system treats prisoners, especially these days of punitive excesses, but Israel’s contempt for the rights of child prisoners particularly, leaves one despairing of humanity and the law. John Lyons has certainly taken the first step into making this awful reality public and we hope to see much more of such honest reporting. The next step requires us all to act. Write to our Foreign Minister, the Hon Kevin Rudd, MP Kevin.Rudd.MP@aph.gov.au and write to Australia’s ambassador to Israel, Andrea Faulknertelaviv.embassy@dfat.gov.au (or to your own country’s representative) and insist that they speak out against these abuses and the use of military courts to prosecute and sentence Palestinian children. Bear in mind that Jewish settler children throw stones, rubbish and excrement at Palestinians and often inflict injury, but the same law doesn’t apply. If settler children are ever charged with throwing stones at all, they would not be brought before a military court, but a civil one where they would receive full representation. They are also not considered adults until they are 18 unlike Palestinian children who are deemed “adults” at 16, although child prisoners can be as young as 13. Such is the clearly racist system that Israel operates.

Also, please write to the Special Representative for Children and Armed Conflict HE Radhika Coomaraswamy, One UN Plaza DC1 - 627 F New York, NY 10017, USA (Tel: +1 212-963-3178 Fax: +1 212-963-0807) and HE Ron Prosor, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Israel to the United Nations, Permanent Mission of Israel to the United Nations, 800 Second Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA.

Sonja Karkar
Editor
http://australiansforpalestine.com


Stone Cold Justice

by John Lyons

The Australian
26 November 2011

You hear them before you see them. The first clue that a new group of 
children is approaching is a shuffle of shoes and a clinking of handcuffs 
and shackles. The door to the courtroom bursts open - four boys, all 
shackled, stare into the room. Four boys looking bewildered.
 

They wear brown prison overalls and they trail into the room where their 
fate is to be decided by a female Israeli army officer/judge, who is sitting 
at the bench, waiting. The look on the face of one of the boys changes to 
elation when he sees his mother at the back of the court. He blows her a 
kiss. But his mother begins crying and this upsets the boy. He begins crying 
too. 

We're sitting in an Israeli military court which is attached to the Ofer 
prison in the West Bank, 25 minutes from Jerusalem. Mondays and Tuesdays 
are "children's days". Hundreds of Palestinian children from the age of 12 are 
brought here each year to be tried under Israeli military law for a range of 
offences. The majority are accused of throwing stones and, as the court has 
close to a 100 per cent conviction rate, almost all will be imprisoned for 
anything from two weeks to 10 months. Some will end up in adult jails. 

Today, groups of children in threes and fours shuffle in; some cases last 
only 60 seconds, just long enough for the child to plead guilty and hear 
their sentence. Sitting in a room 50m away, more children wait. Despite 
their confessions, many insist that they did not throw stones or molotov 
cocktails, and the human rights group Defence for Children International 
estimates that about a third who pass through the system have either been 
shown or signed documentation in Hebrew - a language they cannot 
understand. 

Inside the courtroom, the army's public relations unit wants the IDF guide 
to sit next to me to explain each case. I'm told I can quote him as "my 
guide" but not name him and we are allowed to photograph some of the older 
children but not the younger ones. Nor will they allow us to photograph 
children handcuffed and shackled trying to walk - "absolutely not," my guide 
says. The army obviously realises that such a photo would be enormously 
damaging. After September 11 I'd seen images of alleged terrorists walking 
like this but I'd never seen children treated this way. It's not surprising 
that Israel doesn't want this image out there - it would look uncomfortably 
like a Guantanamo Bay for kids. 

Several countries, led by Britain, are turning up the heat on Israel over 
the treatment of Palestinian children - not only the manner of their arrest 
and interrogation but also the conditions in which they're kept in 
custody. MP Sandra Osborne <http://sandraosborne.weebly.com/palestinian-children.html> , 
part of a British delegation that recently visited the military court, said of the 
visit: "For the children we saw that morning, the only thing that mattered 
was to see their families, perhaps for the first time in months ... A whole 
generation is criminalised through this process."

Into this world has walked Gerard Horton an Australian lawyer. 
<http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2011/s3343068.htm>, Horton was a Sydney 
barrister for about eight years and his practice included contract disputes, 
building insurance cases and employment matters. In 2006, while studying 
for a masters in international law, he volunteered for three months for an 
organisation that represented Palestinian prisoners in the West Bank. He has 
worked there ever since.

During his five years at Defence for Children International 
<http://www.dci-palestine.org/> Horton says the office has increased its 
evidence-gathering capacity and will only pursue credible allegations based 
on sworn affidavits. He takes me through the arrest process: "Once bound and 
blindfolded, the child will be led to a waiting military vehicle and in 
about one-third of cases will be thrown on the metal floor for transfer to 
an interrogation centre.

"Sometimes the children are kept on the floor face down with the soldiers 
putting their boots on the back of their necks, and the children are 
handcuffed, sometimes with plastic handcuffs which cut into their wrists. 
Many children arrive at the interrogation centres bruised and battered, 
sleep-deprived and scared." The whole idea, he says, is to get a confession 
as quickly as possible. 

DCI has documented three cases where children were given electric shocks by 
a hand-held device and Horton claims there is one interrogator working in 
the settlement Gush Etzion "who specialises in threatening children with 
rape". Some cases contain horrifying allegations, such as this one 
from Ahmad, 15 <http://www.dci-palestine.org/documents/voices-occupation-ahmad-f-detention> 
documented by DCI, who was taken from his home at 2am, blindfolded and 
accused of throwing stones. "I managed to see the dog from under my 
blindfold," he says. "They brought the dog's food and put it on my head. I 
think it was a piece of bread, and the dog had to eat it off my head. His 
saliva started drooling all over my head and that freaked me out. I was so 
scared my body started shaking ... they saw me shaking and started laughing 
... Then they put another piece of bread on my trousers near my genitals, so 
I tried to move away but he started barking. I was terrified."

Israel is under pressure to at least allow filming of interrogations. "We 
want interrogations of children audiovisually recorded," says Horton. "This 
would not only provide some protection to the children but would also 
protect Israeli interrogators from any false allegations of wrongdoing." 

Australian diplomats have shown no obvious interest in the military courts 
despite our Ambassador to Israel, Andrea Faulkner, being told about the 
treatment of children a year ago. She refused to comment on the situation 
for this story. Says Horton: "It is disappointing that of all the diplomatic 
missions in the region, Australia has been conspicuously silent on the issue 
of the military courts." 

Horton says the military courts function as a system of control: "The army 
has to ensure that the 500,000 Jewish settlers who live in occupied 
territory go about their daily business without interruption from 2.5 
million Palestinians... it is no coincidence that most children who are 
arrested live close to a settlement or a road used by settlers or the 
army." 

He says it's an effective system; quite often the children emerge scared and 
broken. But there is little recourse. From 2001 to 2010, 645 complaints were 
made against Israeli interrogators; not one resulted in a criminal 
investigation. "Sometimes if there is a group of children who throw stones 
and the settlers or soldiers are not clear exactly who has thrown them, the 
army can go into a village at two or three in the morning and five or 10 
kids get roughed up and it scares the hell out of the whole village," says 
Horton. He adds that when the army arrests children they usually don't say 
why or where they are taking them. 

Former Israeli soldiers have formed Breaking the Silence <http://www.breakingthesilence.org.il/> , 
a group that has gathered more than 700 testimonies about abuses they committed 
or witnessed. Former Israeli army commander Yehuda Shaul says the army sets out 
"to make Palestinians have a feeling of being chased". "The Palestinian guy is 
arrested and released," Shaul says. "He has no idea why he was arrested and 
why he was released so quickly. The rest of the village wonders whether he 
was released because he is a collaborator."
 

Fadia Saleh, who runs 11 rehabilitation centres in the West Bank dealing 
with the effects of detention, says: "Usually the children isolate 
themselves, they become very angry for the simplest reasons, they have 
nightmares. They have lost trust in others. They don't have friends any more 
because they think their friends will betray them. There is also a stigma 
about them - other children and parents say, 'Be careful being seen with 
him, or the Israeli soldiers will target you too.'" 

ORIGINAL LINK: <http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/features/stone-cold-justice/story-e6frg8h6-1226202202928>

Morton Nadler

Get the facts first, then you can distort them as much as you like

Dan De Quille (one of Mark Twain’s early mentors)