Abuse and torture of detainees are immoral and illegal measures
Published:
15 Dec 2015
According to recent media reports, several Israelis have been arrested on suspicion of torching the home of the Dawabsheh family in the Palestinian village of Duma on 31 July 2015. ‘Ali Dawabsheh, one and a half years old, was burned to death in the fire and his parents, Sa’ed and Riham, were seriously injured; they later died of their wounds. The family’s other son, four-year-old Ahmad, is still hospitalized in Israel.
Several decisions by Israel’s Supreme Court indicate that the four people, two of them minors, were arrested at the end of November or early December 2015. The Israel Security Agency (ISA) has kept the four detainees from meeting with their attorneys from the time of their arrest until at least 13 December 2015. Requests to keep holding them without legal counsel were repeatedly authorized every few days by the District Court and the Supreme Court.
The media reported that ISA interrogators are making little headway in the interrogation of the suspected arsonists, an obstacle that may lead to the adoption of “special measures”, a rarity in interrogating Jewish suspects. The term “special measures” is not limited to the preventing legal counsel: it is a code name for a variety of physical and mental abuse techniques, all designed to break a detainee’s spirit. Use of these techniques, especially when interrogators employ them in combination and for lengthy periods, amounts to torture. As shown in several reports issued by B’Tselem and HaMoked: Centre for the Defence of the Individual, the ISA routinely and systematically uses these techniques to interrogate thousands of Palestinians suspected of committing security offenses of varying severity.
The Supreme Court’s decision to continue barring the suspects who are minors from meeting their attorneys reinforces the suspicion that the ISA intends to use “special methods” in this case. In view of B’Tselem’s past findings with regard to Palestinian detainees, preventing meetings with legal counsel is more than a stand-alone measure for pressuring a detainee. Isolating the detainee from the outside world serves interrogators in enabling them to use a variety of techniques that constitute abuse and even torture without being subject to any external monitoring. The pressure resulting from this kind of interrogation often causes detainees to confess to allegations, even falsely, just so the abuse will come to an end.
http://www.btselem.org/torture/20151215_interrogation_of_suspects_in_dawabsheh_killing
