The UN appeal to Israel, Enough with torture and inhuman treatment

The appeal comes after last month the country's attorney general concluded investigations into enhanced interrogation techniques put in place by the Israeli Security Agency.

The use of enhanced interrogation techniques or the adoption of exceptional measures during interrogations in Israel risks causing forced confessions, which the prohibition of torture and ill-treatment under international law is intended to prevent. This is what UN human rights experts declare who have appealed to Israel to guarantee immediate judgment for those responsible for torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The appeal comes after the country's attorney general last month concluded investigations into enhanced interrogation techniques put in place by the Israeli Security Agency against Samer Al-Arbeed, a Palestinian arrested in 2019 on charges of involvement in the explosion of a bomb. Al-Arbeed, according to information found by UN experts, was in good health when he was arrested on 25 September 2019 after a suspected attack in the occupied West Bank in August, in which a 17-year-old Israeli girl was killed and her father and his brother were injured. Within 48 hours, UN experts report, Al-Arbeed was hospitalized with life-threatening injuries and is now.

We are alarmed by Israel's inability to prosecute, punish those responsible for Al-Arbeed's torture and ill-treatment. The fight against these abuses is not at the discretion of the government or the judiciary, but is an absolute obligation under international law. "Allowing individual officers to use the argument of need to defend themselves' in prosecuting them is a serious flaw in the Israeli judicial system which effectively justifies the coercive interrogation of persons suspected of possessing information about military operations. This flawed defense effectively guarantees impunity for investigative measures that amount to torture, the experts insisted.