The residents of Gaza are not waiting on the Goldstone Report to take action. The Defense Ministry and the Tel Aviv Prosecution have reportedly received some 1,500 notices of future civil lawsuits against the IDF over damage caused during Operation Cast Lead. (full article…)

The State Prosecutor’s Office has decided to close a criminal investigation against Border Guard officers documented beating Palestinians. (full article…)

American officials say Washington will likely exercise its veto power if report accusing Israel of war crimes in Gaza is brought to a Security Council vote. (full article…)

Stockholm’s foreign minister urges UN human rights council to discuss report probing Gaza war despite expressed reservations as to its credibility (full article…)

After Ehud Barak nearly arrested in London, Minister Ya’alon cancels his trip to Britain ‘in light of legal recommendation.’ However, together with Mazuz, only two lawyers handling some 1,000 foreign lawsuits against politicians and military officers. ‘Situation intolerable,’ said a senior official in Jerusalem (full article…)

In a startling shift, the Palestinian delegation to the United Nations Human Rights Council dropped its efforts to forward a report accusing Israel of possible war crimes to the Security Council, under pressure from the United States, diplomats said Thursday. (full article…)

“A culture of impunity in the region has existed for too long,” Goldstone, a former UN war crimes prosecutor, told the UN Human Rights Council.

“The lack of accountability for war crimes and possible war crimes against humanity has reached a crisis point; the ongoing lack of justice is undermining any hope for a successful peace process and reinforcing an environment that fosters violence.” (full article…)

“No arrest warrant has been issued, and in any event, he has immunity due to his being a minister in the government,” the bureau said in a statement. “Therefore, his program will continue without disturbance.” (full article…)

In a troubling legal brief filed last week, the Obama administration followed the disreputable example of the Bush White House by opposing judicial review of military detentions, even for a discrete segment of prisoners: the 30 or so non-Afghan Bagram prisoners who were seized outside Afghanistan, far from any recognizable battlefield, and who have been incarcerated for more than six years. (full article…)

But we have a political culture which believes, literally, that the CIA must operate above and beyond the law (recall Joe Klein’s argument against torture prosecutions: CIA agents “behave extra-legally for the greater good of the nation”). Even though the American people have enacted numerous laws through their Congress which explicitly criminalize certain behavior on the part of the intelligence community (torture, warrantless eavesdropping, failing to brief Congress), there is a widespread belief that we can and must allow the CIA to commit crimes with impunity. The CIA’s personal spokesman at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, argues outright that the CIA should not be prosecuted for crimes because we want to ensure they are willing to act illegally in the future. (full article…)

We have long expressed our very serious concern with the mandate that was given (to Goldstone’s team) by the Human Rights Council prior to our joining the Council, which we viewed as unbalanced, one-sided and basically unacceptable. (full article…)

Strange, the same adjectives have been used to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza.

“It wasn’t easy [for him],” Nicole Goldstone said. “My father did not expect to see and hear what he saw and heard.” (full article…)

The two candidates’ starkly different reactions to that ruling was supposed to underscore one of the true differences between them: that Obama, the Constitutional Law Professor, would insist on adherence to core Constitutional liberties even while prosecuting the War on Terror, but McCain wouldn’t. Yet here we are, barely more than a year later, and the Obama DOJ is filing a legal brief chock full of Bush/Cheney/McCain arguments about how “Habeas rights under the U.S. Constitution do not extend to enemy aliens detained in the active war zone at Bagram” and “No court has ever extended the Great Writ so far” and granting such rights “risks opening habeas claims brought by detainees in other theaters of war during future military actions” and doing so would pose “impediments to the military mission and threats to the national interest.” As The New York Times‘ Charlie Savage wrote about the District Court proceeding: “The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.“

Private security guards who worked for Blackwater repeatedly shot wildly into the streets of Baghdad without regard for civilians long before they were involved in a 2007 shooting episode that left at least 14 Iraqis dead, federal prosecutors charge in a new court document. (more…)

There is no question that many of the detainees who have been imprisoned at Guantanamo — and still are imprisoned there — are innocent. After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that they have the constitutional right to a habeas corpus hearing, federal judges in 28 out of 33 cases have found insufficient evidence to justify their detention. It takes a morally warped person not to be outraged by the imprisonment of people for years — held incommunicado and indefinitely, under brutal conditions, as Terrorists, thousands of miles away from their homes — who have done absolutely nothing wrong. And it requires an equal level of moral depravity to question the sincerity of those who object to such travesties, to attribute to opponents of preventive detention ignoble motives — as though only a desire for greater fundraising could motivate anger over the imprisonment of innocent people without charges. (more…)

In what is being hailed as an unprecedented ruling, a federal appeals court has concluded that the George W. Bush administration’s first attorney general, John Ashcroft, can be held personally responsible for the wrongful detention of an innocent U.S. citizen.

In the panic that followed the terrorist attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, the Justice Department rounded up several thousand “Middle Eastern-looking” men and women and detained them, frequently in harsh prison-like facilities, without charges, access to their families, or attorneys.(more…)

Chief Justice of the High Court of Justice, Head of the Higher Justice Council in Gaza gas issued a new decision concerning the clothing of lawyers. PCHR believes that this decision constitutes a violation of the law and an unjustified intervention into lawyers’ affairs. It also undermines personal freedoms and women’s rights through forcing female lawyers to wear traditional robes known as “Jilbab” and veils (Hijabs). (more…)

Political, legal assault against Israel is just beginning (more…)

“There is a war being waged against us in the legal sphere. Its aim is to delegitimize Israel and to create deterrence against a possible use of force in Gaza and Lebanon again,” a senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post. (more…)

A Border Guard officer who shot and killed a Wadi Ara man during a police chase in January 2006 was acquitted of manslaughter on Monday. (more…)

Amer al-Dayah, 28, is the only member of a family of 23 who survived the bombardment of his parents’ house. The dead included his parents, three brothers, three sisters-in-law, two sisters and 12 nieces and nephews. Al-Alami shows some of the photos in the files. One depicts a child’s head in the rubble, eyes wide open, limbs severed. There was nothing left of nine of the victims, and al-Dayah found parts of his mother’s body as far as 100 meters (328 feet) away. “My family was simply gone,” says al-Dayah, a stout man with a boyish face. (more…)

Two founding members of what was once the largest U.S. Muslim charity were each sentenced to 65 years in prison Wednesday for funneling millions of dollars to the Palestinian militant group Hamas. (more…)

The Supreme Court ruled today that former attorney general John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller may not be sued by Arab Muslims who were seized in this country after the 2001 terrorist attacks and allege harsh treatment because of their religion and ethnicity. The court ruled 5 to 4 that the top officials are not liable for the actions of their subordinates absent evidence that they ordered the allegedly discriminatory activity. The decision followed the court’s ideological split between conservatives and liberals, with Justice Anthony M. Kennedy siding with the conservatives and writing the opinion. (more…)

The Palestine Liberation Organization and its governmental entity cannot overturn a court judgment forcing them to pay more than $116 million for a Hamas terror attack that killed a U.S. citizen and his wife, a federal judge has ruled.

The case is among a handful in the country filed under the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1991, which seeks to hold terrorist organizations responsible for the killings of American citizens. (more…)

How much does the U.S. pays out in compensation for the hundreds of thousands of civilians they’ve killed…? Mostly nothing, but in a handful of cases between $500 – $7,500 has been paid. But that’s the market-value of a non-American.

Few people know how to avoid, evade, beat around the bush, beg the question, bypass, circumvent, fudge, sidestep, prevaricate, equivocate, dodge, duck, avoid and ignore as well as Federal Judge Jay S. Bybee, the author of a torture memorandum given to the Central Intelligence Agency. Few people know how to be as skillfully dishonest while appearing to skirt dishonesty. (more…)

Human rights advocates and legal scholars fear that the administration of U.S. President Barack Obama may resurrect the military commissions designed by his predecessor to try Guantanamo detainees after Obama’s 120-day moratorium on proceedings expires on May 20. That possibility appeared to move a step closer to reality when Guantanamo’s chief judge refused to delay a May 27 pretrial hearing for Ahmed Al-Darbi, 34, a Saudi Arabian accused of providing material support for terrorism and participating in a conspiracy to commit murder and other crimes. (more…)

A Spanish judge said Monday he will continue to investigate seven current and former Israeli officials over an Air Force bombing in Gaza in 2002 that killed a Hamas militant and 14 civilians.(more…)

The administration announced that it would not seek to press criminal charges against CIA operatives who participated in enhanced interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. “It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement. (more…)

As Paul Woodward of the blog War in Context correctly points out, Obama’s determination not to pursue justice (he calls it retribution) suggests that “we no longer live in a world where the Nuremberg defense is untenable … ‘I was just following orders,’ has now become an honorable American justification for torture.”

I find it hard to believe that a man as intelligent as Mr. Obama, who once taught constitutional law, would equate the pursuit of justice with retribution. It makes it appear as if his decision is one of political expediency.

If holding the C.I.A. operatives accountable for violating federal or international laws is retribution, then the prosecution of ordinary citizens for crimes is also retribution.

The president does not have the authority to be selective about who should or should not be charged with a crime, and he has made a grievous error by confusing the pursuit of justice with retribution or retaliation. (more…)

A federal appeals court says a former Israeli security chief cannot be sued in the United States for 15 deaths in a Gaza City bombing. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling Thursday in New York. The court said Avraham Dichter was immune under common law from being held responsible for the July 2002 bombing of an apartment complex. Dichter was director of the Israeli Security Agency at the time. A lower court rejected a 2005 lawsuit. It sought class action status for bombing survivors and victims’ families. (more…)

“It [the trial] shouldn’t be limited to the Cambodians,” said Chomsky in an interview that appeared on the weekend. “An international trial that doesn’t take into account Henry Kissinger or other authors of the American bombings and the support of the KR [Khmer Rouge] after they were kicked out of the country, that’s just a farce.”

“The records say that the U.S. wanted to ‘use anything that flies against anything that moves’ [during the bombing of Cambodia], which led to five times the bombing that was reported before, greater than all bombings in all theaters of World War Two, which helped create the Khmer Rouge,” he asserted. (more…)

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who visited the Gaza Strip last week, called for a “full investigation,” Amnesty International is accusing Israel of “war crimes,” and Louis Michel, the EU’s commissioner for aid to developing countries, says: “It is evident that Israel does not respect international humanitarian law.” (more…)

But Mr. Obama must be mindful not to delay too much. Through no fault of his own, he has inherited a system in which many detainees have been held for years without a meaningful review of their cases. They have been denied the opportunity to scrutinize the evidence against them or to gather and present information that could exonerate them. Some have been abused or tortured. Relying on a deeply flawed and unjust legal process such as the one in place at Guantanamo is untenable — but so would be continuing to hold detainees under no process at all. (more…)

“Judicially speaking,” Nowak told the German broadcaster ZDF, “the United States has a clear obligation” to prosecute Rumsfeld and Bush for ordering interrogation methods at Guantanamo that contravened a UN convention on torture.” He added that there were publicly available documents “that prove that these methods of interrogation were intentionally ordered by Rumsfeld.” (more…)

A proper trial would provide the victims with the opportunity to tell their stories and to present their evidence to independent judges; Palestinian and Israeli victims would be equal — the disadvantage of being stateless and the power imbalance between the two parties would no longer exist; testimonies of thousands of Palestinians would finally be heard — people who have already suffered tremendously from the illegal Israeli occupation during which they have been deprived of the most basic human rights for over 40 years. (more…)

A city judge in Georgia has in the past eight days barred two Muslim women wearing Islamic headscarves from entering his courtroom, jailing one, and prompting an inquiry from the civil rights office at the US department of justice. (more…)

Torture and other forms of abuse in Iraqi detention facilities, frequently to elicit confessions in early stages of detention, are well documented. The reliance on confessions in the court’s proceedings, coupled with the absence of physical or other corroborating evidence, raises the possibility of serious miscarriages of justice. In at least 10 investigative hearings and two trials that Human Rights Watch observed, defendants renounced confessions submitted as evidence. In most of those cases, the defendants said they had been physically abused or threatened by interrogators. (more…)

Download the full report in PDF.

A Jerusalem court on Wednesday freed a Jewish settler suspected of firing on Palestinians at point blank range in the flashpoint West Bank city of Hebron. (more…)

The relationship between the Greek people and their police force is strained at best. In the 1930s, it was the police who oppressed the labour movement under Fascism and collaborated with the Germans and they were seen as the agents of the military dictatorship that ended with a student uprising in 1974. (more…)