Israelis who harm Palestinians get away with it



One Israeli soldier (R) has no effect in dispersing masked Jewish settlers from the Havat Gilad settlement, who were throwing stones at Palestinian villagers, near Farata, east of the West Bank ciy of Qalqilya, on February 28, 2012. Photo by Jaafar Ashtiyeh / AFP

Price-tag attack “Israel has often been accused of having two justice systems: one that applies to Palestinians, where trial without detention and punitive sentences are commonplace, and one that applies to Israelis, which adheres to the standards of a liberal democracy.

 

Nowhere is this disjunction more visible than in the prosecution of hate crimes. While hundreds of Palestinians are in Israeli prisons on charges of terror and hatred, there have been hardly any prosecutions of extremist Jewish settlers carrying out price tag attacks. Scores have been arrested, but none has been successfully prosecuted, leading to widespread criticism of the government and calls for the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security agency, to step in.” MEMO

Mock Enforcement

New Report and Data from Yesh Din

May 17, 2015

Yesh Din published today (Sunday 17th) a new report titled Mock Enforcement. The report examines law enforcement on Israeli civilians who harm Palestinians in the West Bank. Law enforcement failures lead to meagre results in terms of the indictment and conviction of offenders:

According to Yesh Din’s figures, 85.3 percent of investigative files are closed due the failure of the police investigators to locate suspects or to find sufficient evidence to enable indictment.

Only 7.4 percent of investigations yielded indictments against suspects.

Only one-third (32.7 percent) of legal proceedings ended in the full or partial conviction of the defendants.

The chance that a complaint submitted to the Israel Police by a Palestinian will lead to an effective investigation, the location of a suspect, prosecution, and ultimate conviction is just 1.9 percent.

The report reveals a worrying picture regarding the conduct of the law enforcement system in general, and the police in particular, in response to ideologically-motivated crime (including violence, damage to property, the seizure of land, and other offenses). The report will be presented on Thursday at a conference to mark the tenth anniversary of the foundation of Yesh Din. For the first time, we are also publishing a data sheet with statistics regarding the outcomes of prosecutions on account of ideological crime in the West Bank.

Yesh Din’s figures reflect failings in every stage of the law enforcement process:

Investigations: The report details a series of failures at all stages of the investigations. The result of these failures is that around 85 percent of files are closed due to the failure of the police investigation to locate suspects or find sufficient evidence to indict suspects. Just 7.4 percent of SJ (Samaria and Judea) District police investigations led to the indictment of suspects.

Prosecution: the probability that a complaint submitted to the Israel Police by a Palestinian will lead to an effective investigation that results in the location of a suspect, and followed by indictment, trial and conviction is just 1.9 percent. Of the small proportion of cases that led to an indictment, only one-third ended in conviction. The remaining cases end in the acquittal of the defendants, the nullification of the indictment, a ruling of culpability without conviction, or other outcomes.

In addition, the failure of defendants to appear for legal proceedings is a relatively common phenomenon in the cases monitored by Yesh Din. Yesh Din is monitoring 71 cases in which it was decided to indict suspects. In at least 18 of these proceedings, members of the organization have documented the failure of defendants to appear at scheduled hearings. In most of these cases, the defendants show a systemic pattern of failure to attend. In some cases, their absence led to the suspension of the legal proceedings.


Israeli settler attack near Hebron, 2014. Photo from Radio Sanabel. If the Civil Administration or IDF do want to stop a particularly troublesome Israeli, they will simply remove him from the West Bank, by-passing due process.

The outcome of these law enforcement failures is the extensive use of administrative orders against Israeli suspects. In the absence of investigations yielding a sufficient evidential infrastructure for prosecution, the law enforcement agencies use a “short cut” enabling them to remove individuals from the West Bank, or restrict their movement, if they are considered “problematic.” The use of administrative orders is improper and incompatible with the rule of law in a democracy, since it is intended to bypass the right to due process that is the core of every suspects’ rights.

Ziv Stahl, the director of Yesh Din’s Research Department and the author of the report, comments: “The failures and structural problems described in the report lead to the inevitable conclusion that the law enforcement system in the West Bank lacks the most important component of all: a genuine motivation to investigate, prosecute, and convict Israeli offenders who attack Palestinians. Without enforcement there can be no deterrence. The state thereby conveys the message to offenders that it does not take a serious view of their actions, and perhaps even that it is not interested in halting these actions”.

 

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Read the full report MOCK ENFORCEMENT
The failure to enforce the law on Israeli civilians in the West Bank, English, pdf file.

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