Human Rights Glance
Under the guise of the deceptively mundane name "Amendment to the Cooperative Associations Bill," the Knesset's Constitution, Law and Justice Committee this week finalized a bill intended to bypass previous rulings of the High Court of Justice. If indeed this legislation is approved by the Knesset plenum, it will not be possible to describe it as anything other than an apartheid law.
Ten years ago, the High Court of Justice ordered the town of Katzir to accept the family of Adel and Iman Kaadan, Arab citizens of Israel, as members of the community. Seven years later, the court issued a similar ruling against the Galilee village of Rakefet, which, like Katzir, is Jewish. Now, however, the legislature has come up with a proper "Zionist" response to the justices: If it becomes law, the amendment will give acceptance committees of communal villages the authority to limit residence in their towns exclusively to Jews.
Shin Bet prisoners are often incarcerated and interrogated under unsatisfactory conditions, according to a report to be released on Tuesday by the rights groups B'Tselem and Hamoked.
Omar Khar was sentenced today to 40 years in prison for murder, terrorism and spying by a military panel unaware that the confessed Canadian war criminal had agreed to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence capped at eight years and the chance to return to Canada after one more year in Guantanamo.
The troops operated under the command of an unnamed US major, who had been involved in the rape of an Iraqi female, showed one such document posted on the whistleblower website WikiLeaks.
It has been one of the most bitter legal debates during the so-called war on terror - who's to blame for torture and how many degrees of separation are needed to dodge a lawsuit?
A senior UN official condemned attacks by Jewish "settler extremists" on Palestinians' olive trees in the occupied West Bank and called on Israel to "combat violence and terror by Israelis."
The British military has been training interrogators in techniques that include threats, sensory deprivation and enforced nakedness in an apparent breach of the Geneva conventions, the Guardian has discovered.
