Human Rights First

Previously known as Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and now rechristened as Human Rights First.

From Nabeel Abraham, et al., ^[1] discussion of several human rights organizations:

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights (LCHR) was founded in 1975 by the International League for Human Rights and the Council of New York Law Associates as a “public interest law center that monitors, investigates and reports on violations of human rights throughout the world, including the rights of people seeking refuge in the United States from political persecution abroad.”

Since 1980 LCHR and the Watch Committees have published an annual Critique of the US Department of State’s Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. They also co-published The Reagan Administration’s Record on Human Rights in 1986. These reports have been generally critical of both the State Department and the Reagan administration; however, their coverage of Israeli violations of Palestinian human rights has varied from non-existent to minimal. For example, The Reagan Administration’s Record on Human Rights covers only 31 countries, omitting Israel and the Palestinians as well as the rest of the Middle East.

The 1986 Critique of the State Department is a marked improvement over the 1985 Critique as well as the one on the Reagan administration. The 1985 version was marred by evasiveness and lacked the strong criticism of the State Department report usually found in discussion of similar abuses elsewhere. In the 1986 Critique, thirty-nine countries are surveyed, including Israel and the occupied territories. This report sharply criticizes the State Department for misrepresenting mistreatment of detainees, including the use of torture, by Israel. It also criticizes the State Department for not assessing the credibility of Palestinian complaints of human rights abuses, and for not specifying the kinds of abuse commonly alleged. The report notes:

In fact, there is ample evidence that a variety of forms of physical and psychological abuse are employed on a systematic basis in prisons and detention camps in the Occupied Territories.

Prolonged sleep deprivation; enforced standing for many hours at a time; hooding and blindfolding of detainees; subjection to alternation extremes of heat and cold showers – all of these techniques are used as a matter of course to intimidate and disorient Palestinian security suspects in the initial hours and days of detention in the Occupied Territories. Beating with fists, kicking in the groin, and boxing the ears also occur on a significant scale. Reports of more serious forms of physical abuses, such as banging a detainee’s head against the wall or tapping his head

with the edge of a ruler, occur less frequently, but they occur too often to be dismissed out of hand (pp. 66-67).

The report argues that the State Department’s most serious omission was its failure to recognize that most human rights violations are committed by Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, rather than the army or police.

Finally, the report notes that most convictions are based on confessions, and that such confessions are virtually impossible to challenge legally under a system where detainees are held incommunicado for weeks at a time. Moreover, the existing laws invite abuse by making confessions an integral part of the legal process in the occupied territories. The report also criticizes the State Department report for ignoring the fact that detention and deportation orders, issued by the military governor, have never been overruled by the Israeli Supreme Court.

LCHR plans to issue a 200-250 page report marking 20 years of Israeli rule in the occupied territories. LCHR has been working with two on-site organizations: Al Haq/Law in the Service of Man and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel. According to an LCHR spokesperson, the report will focus on narrow issues, such as the legal apparatus of occupation (military orders, arrest practices, deportations, house demolitions, role of the Supreme Court). Before the report is officially released, it first will be submitted to the Israeli government, to individuals in the US government, and to others in the Middle East. According to the LCHR spokesperson, all of this is standard procedure.

In 1987, LCHR submitted an amicus brief in a lawsuit seeking to overturn the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act, a McCarthy-era law that bars from the US aliens suspected of “communist” leanings. The lawsuit arose from the Los Angeles arrest of seven Palestinians, and the Kenyan wife of one, all resident aliens, on charges brought under the Act in early 1987.

Board of Directors and Personnel

William D. Zabel — Chair	Tom A. Bernstein — President	James Ziglar, Sr — Treasurer
Barbara A. Schatz — Secretary	M. Bernard Aidinoff	Raymond M. Brown
Lynda Clarizio	Craig Cogut	Donald Francis Donovan
A. Whitney Ellsworth	Kenneth R. Feinberg	Leslie Gimbel
R. Scott Greathead	Louis Henkin	Robert D. Joffe
Lewis B. Kaden	Juliette Kayyem	Kerry Kennedy
Harold Hongju Koh	Philip A. Lacovara	Jo Backer Laird
Robert Todd Lang	Steven R. Shapiro	George A. Vradenburg
Sigourney Weaver	Marvin E. Frankel(1920 – 2002) — Chairman Emeritus	Michael H. Posner — Executive Director

Contact details

Human Rights First

333 Seventh Avenue

13th Floor

New York, NY 10001-5004

Tel: (212) 845 5200

Fax: (212) 845 5299

Email: communications AT humanrightsfirst.org

Web: www.humanrightsfirst.org

External Resources

• ^Nabeel Abraham, Janice Terry, Cheryl Rubenberg, Lisa Hajjar, and Hilary Shadroui, International Human Rights Organizations and the Palestine Question, Middle East Report (MERIP), Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 12 – 20.