http://www3.haaretz.co.il/eng/scripts/article.asp?mador=4&datee=04/16/00&id=75714
Good morning, High Court
By Gideon Levy, Ha'aretz 04/16/2000
This weekend, the espionage trial began for 13 Iranian Jews who have
been imprisoned for over a year. It's hard to know whether they will
get a fair trial; perhaps they are spies and perhaps not. In any case,
Israel and the Jewish world have been moving heaven and earth to
protect them since their arrest.Until recently, 13 others faced a
harder fate. In contrast with the Iranian Jews, most of the 13
Lebanese citizens abducted by Israel were not granted any trial, never
mind a fair one. In contrast with the Iranian Jews, the Lebanese are
not suspected of illegal acts: Israel has freely admitted that it held
them only as "bargaining cards." They were held without charges or
judicial process as hostages of the state that abducted them - and
some of them were selected for this fate by nothing more than their
family names. Those who were tried were sentenced to short prison
terms and when they were done, they were thrown back into
administrative detention, in a process that undermined both the
sentences that should not have been given and the authority of the
judiciary.
The world barely whispered - in contrast with Iran, Israel is, after
all, the only democracy in the Middle East. We heard barely a grumble
from even our most enlightened quarters: After all, this was part of
the effort to bring back our prisoners of war and missing soldiers, so
all is permitted, with the support of human rights advocates such as
Yaakov Perry, the former head of the Shin Bet security services.
Still, we might have expected at least one Israeli institution - the
one that is always seen as a beacon for justice and the law - to put
an end to this disgrace. But for years, the High Court of Justice not
only failed to oppose the imprisonment of hostages in Israel, but went
so far as to justify the wrongdoing. High Court President Justice
Aharon Barak, whom many consider the most enlightened of Israelis,
wrote only two-and-a-half years ago that releasing the "unnamed
persons," as they were (in typical manner) called, "would cause real
damage to state security." The court has been terrorized by the
defense establishment, generally through classified and secret reports
heard in camera. In cases of torture, house demolitions, deportations,
detentions without trial, expropriations of land or the early release
of an old and ailing spy, the court abnegates itself before the
defense establishment, silent in the face of caprice, trampling more
than a few principles of law, morality and justice.
A change is underway, and, much too late, a new wind is blowing
through the halls of justice. It started when the High Court put an
end to Shin Bet torture, continued with the interim decision to allow
the Palestinian cave-dwellers to return to their homes and presses
forward with the decision to release the Lebanese captives. These
moves are good news whether they originate in the new government in
Israel, a slightly more enlightened public, the effects of Justice
Barak's frequent contact with academics in the United States, or a new
trend of safeguarding international human rights that includes
prosecuting violators.
But it is difficult to absolve the High Court of responsibility for
previous events: It is not enough for Barak to write courageously in
his ruling that "we must be prepared to admit our mistake." What does
it mean for the president of a state's supreme court to admit to an
error that cost innocent people their liberty? In innumerable other
cases, the court's job is to identify responsible parties and demand
that they pay for their mistakes. So here, the court should be
confronted with its own responsibility: "You erred, so who will pay?
Who will pay reparations to the tens of thousands of people who were
tortured with your authorization before torture became illegal and
thus immoral? Who will pay reparations to the thousands of young
people who were detained without trial for the years they lost in
Israeli prisons, while the High Court approved their incarceration?
And now, who will pay the 13 Lebanese citizens, some of whom were mere
youths at the time of their arrest, for their years in jail? If indeed
the High Court president recognizes the court's mistakes, he must
accept responsibility and award compensation to the victims. The list
of those waiting for justice is still long.
