On 21 March 2010, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon met with the parents of an Israeli soldier held captive by armed groups in Gaza since June 2006. Following the meeting, the soldier’s father said that Mr. Ban had “expressed sympathy, support and maximal understanding of our situation and the nightmare that we are enduring”. [Haaretz, 21 March 2010]

No similar consideration, however, was extended by the UN Secretary-General to any family member of the 6,631 Palestinian political prisoners and detainees currently held in prisons and detention centers inside Israel in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, let alone to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who have been arrested and detained throughout Israel’s unlawful 42-year occupation of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.

Prior to Mr. Ban’s visit to the occupied Palestinian territory, arrangements had been made through the Ramallah office of UNIFEM, a UN agency, for the Secretary-General to meet with the families of several Palestinian female prisoners. However, shortly before the scheduled meeting was to take place, it was cancelled without explanation to the family members or parties involved.

Addameer submits that through this inequitable course of action, Mr. Ban displayed an unacceptable insensitivity to the thousands of Palestinian prisoners and their families and abdicated a number of his principal duties as head of the United Nations.

As Secretary-General of the UN, among Mr. Ban’s primary responsibilities is a duty to protect the UN Charter. This duty has particular relevance in the present context, where Israel, as an occupying State power, is committing war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity against an occupied Palestinian population. In addition, as the head of the UN, Mr. Ban bears an obligation to use his position to promote and guarantee respect and adherence to UN resolutions, and the international legal provisions they support.

However, by failing to meet with any Palestinian ex-detainees or their families, the UN Secretary-General failed to honor his obligations under the UN Charter to Palestinian civil society and to the international community at large. This failure must also be considered in light of the additional invitation issued to the father of the Israeli soldier to attend a meeting with the UN Council on Human Rights, held at the Geneva Headquarters on 22 March 2010. Such sustained attention has rarely, if ever, been accorded to a family member of a Palestinian political prisoner.

Furthermore, the UN Secretary-General’s failure to honor the voices of Palestinians has occurred amidst pervasive and systematic human rights abuses perpetrated against Palestinian political prisoners. This particularly includes the tremendous suffering of the families of the almost 800 Palestinian political prisoners from Gaza at present, whose rights to maintain family contact under international law are systematically denied. Family visits for Gazan prisoners have been absolutely banned since 6 June 2007 when Israel unilaterally suspended the Family Visit Programme run by the International Committee of the Red Cross from Gaza. Despite petitions advanced by human rights groups to challenge Israel’s discriminatory ban on Gazan visitation rights, the Israeli High Court of Justice ruled on 9 December 2009 that family visits are not a basic humanitarian right that Israel is obliged to provide to Gazan detainees or their families residents. While the Family Visit Programme for detainees from the West Bank still continues, the unlawful restrictions on freedom of movement imposed by Israel’s permit regime severely limit the possibility of family members to visit their detained relatives held in Israeli prisons.
 

 

Moreover, by not considering, let alone condemning, the breaches of international humanitarian and human rights law which Israel’s methods of arrest, detention and treatment routinely entail, the UN Secretary-General repudiated his responsibility to promote and support UN agencies and NGOs who work diligently to monitor and enforce adherence to international law. In so doing, the UN Secretary-General missed a valuable opportunity to draw the attention of the international community to violations of international law carried out by Israel against Palestinian prisoners and the highly disproportionate rate of imprisonment of Palestinians. This fosters the very “culture of impunity” that was recently censured in the Goldstone Report in the wake of the conflict in Gaza. [Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict, para. 1366, page 381.]

The UN Secretary-General’s decision to privilege the suffering of the family of one captured Israeli soldier over the trauma of the families of close to 7,000 Palestinian political prisoners and detainees only serves to further erode Palestinian civil society’s confidence in the UN’s human rights protection mechanisms. By ignoring the Palestinian prisoner experience, the UN Secretary-General has trivialized the suffering of Palestinian political prisoners and their families. Addameer condemns the UN’s privileging of the concerns of the occupying State power over the daily living conditions of the occupied peoples, and urges Mr. Ban to immediately and publicly reaffirm his commitment to respect of the international law in the treatment of Palestinian prisoners, to his responsibilities to the UN Charter and to Palestinian society and their efforts toward self-determination.