On December 17, a number of Palestinians alleging human rights violations by Israel in Gaza and the West Bank filed a federal lawsuit pursuant to the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) against the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken.
Their contention: that the US State Department has failed to implement the strictures of the Leahy Law. The law, comprising one segment covering the State Department, and the other the Department of Defense, prohibits the use of US assistance to the units of foreign security forces suspected of committing gross violations of human rights (GVHRs). The proviso for restoring that assistance can only take place if the offending entity in question takes adequate steps to address the violations.
Examples of such violations include torture, extrajudicial killing, prolonged detention without charges and trial, enforced disappearance, rape and, as broadly noted in the Leahy Law’s own definition “other flagrant denials of the right to life, liberty, or the security of the person.”
The action, supported by Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN), seeks declaratory and injunctive relief based on Blinken’s “de facto refusal to implement the statute prohibiting US assistance to Israeli security force units about which there is credible information that they have committed gross violations of human rights”.
Blinken’s record when applying the Leahy Law to Israeli units is disturbingly scrappy. In May, for instance, he explained to Congress that the punishments meted out to soldiers and officers in four cases prior to the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, were adequate. One example deserves attention, involving an officer in the Shahar Search and Rescue Battalion of the IDF.
The soldier in question shot and killed Ahmed Manasra, an unarmed Palestinian, in March 2019. A plea deal reached between the military prosecutor and the soldier, subsequently approved by a panel of military judges, proved exceedingly generous to the soldier as it was degrading to Manasra: a three-month term of community service, and a three-month suspended sentence. Blinken accordingly found, as outlined in his memorandum of justification, that the Israeli government “is taking effective steps to bring to justice the responsible member of the Shahar Battalion.” It was a decision perplexing to Tim Rieser, a longtime aide to the chief author of the relevant statute, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt). Blinken’s justification was inconsistent “with how the law is written and how it was intended to be applied.” (more...)
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