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45, February 2008 |
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In this roundtable, Adalah
wishes to raise the question of whether or not human rights
organizations should continue to file petitions to the Israeli Supreme
Court concerning the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT). As is well
known, the Supreme Court has accepted only a handful of cases from the
thousands of petitions brought before it during the forty years of the
Occupation, and clearly the court’s judicial policy has been to endorse
the actions of the Israeli army in the OPT, irrespective of
international law.
One can argue that continuing to address the
Israeli Supreme Court might be considered as legitimization of the
Occupation. Additionally, the rhetoric employed by the court differs
dramatically from the actual results of its decisions. Thus, while the
judicial rhetoric often suggests that justice has been done, the
court’s decisions in fact serve to uphold the Israeli army’s gross
violations of human rights. Moreover, continuing to approach the
court may create the illusion that due process is being respected and
limitations are being imposed on the army. Approaching the court as
such, it may be contended, infers that the occupier's court is the site
where human rights violations resulting from the conflict are solved.
Conversely,
it may be argued that the Israeli Supreme Court will never succeed to
make the Occupation legitimate from the perspective of Palestinians and
the international community, whatever decisions it may deliver. If the
South African courts which often delivered favorable decisions for
black victims, unlike the Israeli Supreme Court, did not legitimize
Apartheid, then how can the Israeli Supreme Court, which upholds
actions of the Israeli military that violate international law on a
daily basis, succeed to legitimize the Occupation? In addition, one may
maintain that it would be very comfortable for the Israeli Supreme
Court if it did not have to hear any more OPT cases, as it could avoid
issuing decisions that lead to its being perceived by the rest of the
world as a non-democratic court. By continuing to have recourse to the
court, at a minimum an official record of violations of human rights
will be created, which might strengthen the international struggle
against the Occupation.
What are your thoughts on this contentious issue?
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Gad
Barzilai
Professor
of International Studies, Law, and Political Science in the Jackson School of
International Studies, and the Law, Societies and Justice Program at the University of
Washington
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George Bisharat
Professor of Law, University of California-Hastings
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Kathleen Cavanaugh
Lecturer, Irish Centre for Human Rights, National University of Ireland
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Daphna Golan
Faculty of Law, The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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Lisa Hajjar
Chair, Law and Society Program, University of California-Santa Barbara
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Hala Khoury-Bisharat
Lecturer in International Criminal Law at the
Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University and the College of Management School of Law,
and is a member of Adalah’s Board of Directors.
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Ronen Shamir
Professor of Sociology and Law, and at present Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University | | | | | | |
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