JERUSALEM, June 27 -- An Israeli civil rights group Tuesday petitioned the Supreme Court to stop the practice of 'shaking' detainees during interrogations, a practice that led to the death of a Palestinian prisoner earlier in the year. At a news conference called to release its annual report, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel said that while the technique leaves no visible marks on the body, it is clearly a form of torture. Mohammed Harizat, a suspected member of the radical Hamas Islamic Resistance Movement, died in April after being shaken so violently during interrogation he suffered fatal brain damage. 'ACRI's position is that all bodily violence and torture in interrogation must be prohibited, and certainly a practice which presents a proven risk of causing death,' spokeswoman Dalia Dromi said. A state commission had previously ruled the Shin-Bet secret police were allowed to use 'moderate physical pressure' in interrogating Palestinian prisoners. The group released its annual report of activities in the past 12 months, saying the general state of civil rights in Israel had improved, but that discrimination against Arab citizens and the status quo in religious affairs meant Israel could not join other advanced countries in the world. The organization said state control of religion was harming citizens' rights in that it effects even burial in public cemeteries and bars the sale of pork, forbidden by Jewish religious law. And the peace process has not bringing progress to Israel's indigenous Arab minority, which totals 18 percent of the country's population, the group said.
'We are not in a situation that allows us to say the peace process has improved the situation,' ACRI Director Edna Margolit said. 'We are still very very far away from that.' Margolit said the peace process had led to a reduction in the association's work on behalf of residents of the occupied territories, now that many of them came under the jurisdiction of the Palestinian Authority led by Yasser Arafat and not the Israeli army. Although the number of complaints has not fallen dramatically, Margolit said there was now no clear way of addressing human rights infringements in the Gaza Strip. The annual report cited progress in affirmative action programs, which ACRI was pushing in order to get more qualified Arabs and women into senior civil service positions. Israel has to take steps to get members of those two groups into the government, or it will find itself in 10 years with the same low level of 4 percent or less representation by the two minority groups, said ACRI legal investigator Netta Ziv.
