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The Role of National Courts in Preventing Torture of Suspected Terrorists
Eyal Benvenisti1
Full text available: PDF format *
I. Introduction
Three interim decisions of the Israeli High Court of Justice (the Court) issued during 1996 allowed the continuation of interrogations of suspected terrorists by the Israeli General Security Service (GSS), subject to some restrictions.2 On 9 May 1997, after reviewing a special Israeli report on the subject, the Committee Against Torture (CAT) decided that the methods mentioned in these cases and additional methods described by non-governmental organizations constituted breaches of Article 16 of the 1984 Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, and also amounted to torture as defined in Article 1 of that Convention.3 CAT also criticized the Court for one of the above decisions,4 whose effect, according to CAT, was to allow some of the interrogation practices to continue and to legitimize them for domestic purposes.5 This comment examines these decisions and assesses the problems and challenges inherent in the domestic regulation of interrogations of suspected terrorists.
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1 Associate Professor, Faculty of Law, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem, 91905, Israel. I am grateful to Amikhai
Cohen and Alon Harel for their valuable comments on previous drafts. I also
thank Amikhai Cohen for his able research assistance. Support for research on
which this article is based was provided by the Israeli Science Foundation. The
author was Deputy Chairperson of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel at
the time when its petition mentioned in note 13 infra was brought. The
views expressed in this comment are those of the author alone.
2 The cases are: HCJ (High Court of Justice) 7964/95, HCJ-VR (Various
Requests) 336/96, Bilbeisi v. The General Security Service (1 January
1996); HCJ 8049/96 Hamdan v. The General Security Service (14 November
1996); HCJ 3124/96 Mubarak v. The General Security Service (17 November
1996).
3 Conclusions and Recommendations of the Committee against Torture,
UN Doc CAT/L/SR. 297/Add. 1, 9 May 1997.
4 The Hamdan Decision, supra note 1.
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