Adalah Demands Urgent Police Directives to End Harrassment and Detention of Aljazeera Correspondents

On 17 July 2006, Adalah sent an urgent letter to State Prosecutor Eran Shendar and Minister of Public Security Avi Dichter, demanding the release of a correspondent of the Arabic Aljazeera television network, Mr. Walid al-Omri, and order the police to stop the harrassment and detention of correspondents from the network during the course of their journalistic work.

Adalah sent the letter after various media outlets published reports detailing the many forms of harrassment which two Aljazeera correspondents, Mr. al-Omri and Mr. Elias Karam, suffered at the hands of the police during a single day. According to the reports, Mr. al-Omri was twice detained for hours at a time and Mr. Karam was held inside a police car for an hour. Mr. al-Omri was released two hours after Adalah sent its letter objecting to the treatment of the two correspondents.

The police alleged that the two correspondents were detained because of their media work, which indicated locations where katyusha rockets landed in northern Israel. No other journalists have been detained for this reason, although all journalists present at the sites of fallen rockets have made similar reports through the television media and shown similar pictures.

In the letter, Adalah Attorney Abeer Baker argued that the repeated harrassment of Mr. al-Omri and Mr. Karam was completely illegal, and that most of the evidence suggests that the detentions were carried out because of the Arab identity of the Aljazeera network and the two correspondents. Adalah emphasized that the correspondents were carrying out their journalistic duty to report, in a full and complete manner, on what they witnessed and heard, as were other journalists who were not harrassed. This discriminatory treatment, contended Adalah, supports the argument that the motivations for the harrassment of the police were questionable and unobjective.

Adalah further argued that the detention of the correspondents and obstruction of the work not only infringes their right to employment and the principle of the freedom of the press, and damages the interests of Aljazeera, but also violates the right of hundreds of thousands of viewers, and in particular Arab viewers in Israel, who watch the Aljazeera channel as a source of reliable and professional information.