Trial of Palestinian Leader Focuses Attention on Israeli Courts
Marwan Barghouti, the Palestinian leader charged with orchestrating 26 killings in the current violence between Israel and the Palestinians, was ushered into District Court today in his brown prison uniform and unleashed what has become his familiar objections.

"You don't have the right to try me," Mr. Barghouti, the West Bank chief of Yasir Arafat's Fatah movement, told the three-judge panel. "This is a violation of international law and the Geneva Convention."

Judge Sara Sirota, presiding over the panel, said, "We've heard you before, Mr. Barghouti." In response to his unsolicited comments, she had him removed from the courtroom several times as testimony proceeded without him.

This case is the centerpiece of an Israeli effort to show it can counter violence and still run an open legal system that meets internationally accepted standards. Mr. Barghouti, whose trial began a month ago, is the most prominent Palestinian figure ever brought before an Israeli civilian court.

Israel has previously handled such cases in its military courts in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where the rules are somewhat more favorable to the prosecution. Military prosecutors filed 5,500 criminal cases against Palestinians last year. While many are still not resolved, the conviction rate in military courts has been running at 97 percent in recent years, according to military officials.

Israel asserts that even its most widely debated practices to try to stem violence can withstand legal scrutiny — the killings of dozens of Palestinian militants, the detention of suspects without charges and the demolition of family homes that belonged to those accused of carrying out attacks against Israelis. But Palestinians and human rights activists say these actions are legally unacceptable, and often amount to collective punishment of Palestinians.

The American justice system is facing similar questions about the treatment of defendants in terrorism cases, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks

Lior Yavne, a spokesman for the Israeli human rights group B'tselem, said that "inside Israel proper, you have a law-abiding state, a proper liberal democracy."

"But once you cross into the Palestinian territories, the situation changes immediately," he said in reference to the West Bank and Gaza. "Whatever is convenient to do in the occupied territories, Israel does without concern for international legal norms."

Israeli civilians have faced attacks for decades, and in hundreds of legal rulings, the courts have confronted the toughest issues about what is a justified Israeli response.

The Israeli Supreme Court outlawed torture in 1999, though critics say it still takes place. The justices have upheld detention without trial and house demolitions, while setting criteria to limit the practices. The court is preparing to rule on a petition objecting to singling out individual militants for attacks, which Palestinians call assassinations.…
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/05/international/middleeast/05PALE.html