Summary
Israel’s practice of imprisoning Palestinians for long periods without disclosed charges, indictment or trial, against which the hunger strikes of Falk’s Part 3 are directed (Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, PDF p.91).
Details
- Definition as Falk gives it: the practice “allows Israelis to keep individuals imprisoned for long periods without disclosing charges or preparing an indictment” (PDF p.91); it “depends on accusations contained in secret evidence not disclosed to the detainee or defense lawyers and allows Israel to imprison Palestinians for six months at a time without bringing any criminal charges, with terms renewable as they expire” (PDF p.116).
- Scale as given across the posts: approximately three hundred Palestinians besides Khader Adnan in February 2012 (PDF p.94), including “21 of the 120 elected members of the Palestinian Legislative Council” in Mustafa Barghouthi’s account (PDF p.99), a 50 percent increase in the number held during the last year (PDF p.119), and “Twenty percent of the Palestinian population of the occupied Palestinian territories has at one point been held under administrative detention by Israeli forces” (PDF p.120).
- Falk’s legal assessment: reliance on it “is totally unacceptable from the perspective of international law, including the Geneva Conventions” (PDF p.97); the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination concluded in its most recent session that the policy represents “two laws for two peoples in a single land” and amounts to arbitrary detention contravening Article 3’s prohibition of “racial segregation and apartheid” (PDF p.120-121). Its legal basis as defended by spokesman Mark Regev is a 1946 British law, from which Falk concludes the practice is colonial “internment” (PDF p.100-101).
- Falk proposes beginning abolition by renaming: rechristening it as “administrative torture” or “lawless captivity” (PDF p.103).
- A still lesser protection exists beside it: the Incarceration of Unlawful Combatants Law applied to Mahmoud Sarsak, which Falk says offers a detained person even less protection than administrative detention (PDF p.128).
- Totals shift between posts (see Open questions on the source page); each figure above stands with its post’s date.
Related pages
Palestine: The Legitimacy of Hope, Hunger Strikes, Khader Adnan, Hana Shalabi, Mahmoud Sarsak