DATE: Friday 3rd Oct 2014, 3:00pm – 5:00pm
LOCATION: The Peak, 5 Wilton Road, London SW1V 1LL (across the road from Victoria Station next to Apollo Theatre)*
FACEBOOK EVENT: https://www.facebook.com/events/736066089774779
*Please note change of venue – the G4S management are based in The Peak so we will be protesting there this week.
COMPLICITY IN TORTURE
G4S secures Israel’s prisons and interrogation centres where Palestinian children are being caged and tortured. These include the notorious Al Jalame interrogation centre in northern Israel where children are caged three floors below the surface in filthy 3m x 1m holes in the ground, in solitary confinement for up to 65 days. Their only escape being the interrogation room where the children, shackled by their hands and feet, are abused and tortured for 6 hours at a time. G4S also secures the “Russian compound” of Jerusalem prison where Palestinian women, as punishment for refusing to strip naked, have had their bodies attached to an electrocution device which burns them from inside.
Having discovered that the top G4S management, including their CEO, are not resident at G4S HQ but are hiding in plush offices up the road on the top floor of The Peak (across the road from Victoria Station next to the Apollo Theatre), this week we will take the protest to them and demand G4S stop its complicity in Israel’s crimes against Palestinian prisoners.
COMPLICITY IN ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION
The Palestinian prisoners rights group, the Ahrar Center for Prisoners Studies, revealed that Israel is now ( as of 26th Sept 2014) holding 540 Palestinians in administrative detention – the highest number since 2008.
Administrative detention is an illegal practice used by Israel to imprison Palestinians indefinitely without charge or trial.
Prisoners are given rolling detention orders which can be anything from 1-6 months, renewable indefinitely. This is against international law. For example administrative detainee Mazen Natsheh has been locked up cumulatively for nearly 10 years without charge or trial.
Detention orders are based on so called “secret information” which never needs to be produced, either to the detainee nor their lawyer.
Administrative detention is often used to arbitrarily jail Palestinians where there is no evidence for a trial, or for punishment as in the case of Palestinian MPs. 30 MPs and two ministers are currently locked up – many of them under indefinite administrative detention.
Israel had on average issued over 2000 detention orders every year (2007-2011). That figure has now shot up and today there are 540 administrative detainees.
Palestinian prisoners rights group Addameer have documented “many cases where the detainees themselves will say that administrative detention is actually far worse than a fixed sentence, be that five years, ten years, 20 years, or whatever and why. With a fixed sentence, you know when you’re going home, a prisoner knows when he goes home. It could be ten years or 15 years down the line, but they know when they’re going home. Not with an administrative detention..” They have documented “many cases where prisoners or detainees have been literally leaving the prison, walking out of the prison with their bags in their hand after their administrative detention order has expired and the Israelis have handed that detainee another administrative detention order and they have to go back into the cell to recommence another administrative detention order. Now, this is a form of psychological torture for not only the detainee and their families.”
To protest Israel’s illegal system of administrative detention Palestinian administrative detainees have launched many mass hunger strikes over the years, and there are reports of another imminent hunger strike.
Figures reveal that the vast majority of administrative detainees – 86% – are locked up in G4S secured prisons, most of them having been transferred from the West Bank into Israel in contravention of Article 76 of the Fourth Geneva Convention.
On Friday we will demand the immediate release of all administrative detainees and demand the British security company G4S stop its complicity in Israel’s illegal practice of administrative detention.
LIVE UPDATES DURING PROTEST
We will, inshAllah, be tweeting live from the protest with live photos being uploaded to our twitter and facebook page. So if you can’t join us on the day, please help us by sharing the photos as they get uploaded.
https://www.facebook.com/inmindscom
https://twitter.com/InmindsCom
If you support this activity please share this alert widely, thank you.
JazakAllah,
Abbas Ali
Palestinian Prisoners Campaign
www.inminds.com/caged
