Israel - setting the example for Guantanamo and the US military commissions.

History will judge us by how we treat the Arabs.

Attributed to
Chiam Weizmann
First president of modern Israel

Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization is providing the raw material for that judgment.

Israel's military court system for Palestinian suspects in the West Bank produces almost automatic convictions, an Israeli human rights group charged Sunday.

The group, Yesh Din, said in a new report that in 2006 more than 99.7 percent of those accused were convicted, 95 percent in plea bargains.

Yesh Din said its inquiry, which included attending more than 800 hearings and conducting extensive interviews with lawyers and court staff, concluded that suspects were often unable to present a full defense with effective counsel.

Yesh Din is funded in part by the British and Dutch governments and its board includes former Israeli Attorney General Michael Ben Yair, retired Gen. Shlomo Lahat and former Cabinet minister Shulamit Aloni.

The Israeli military, quite expectedly, disagreed with the report but did not address this:

The Yesh Din report said, however, that military court proceedings can be startlingly brief, citing a study of 38 hearings where prosecutors sought to extend suspects' detention in custody until the end of case, which generally means remand for a year or more.

Of those 38 hearings, Yesh Din says, seven lasted between two and four minutes, 19 lasted between one and two minutes and 12 were over in less than a minute.

And then something even more familiar starts to show up.

"Most are detained in Israel and their attorneys are not able to meet them," said Michael Sfard, Yesh Din's legal counsel. In addition, minors were often tried as adults and detained at length before being charged.

I wonder who learned from whom?

Sfard said the 0.29 percent acquittal rating in 2006, or 23 cases out of 9,123, was most jarring.

"We think that this is an outrageous number which clouds the presumption of innocence," he said. "It is unreasonable that a justice system will have such a low figure of victory of the defense."

The jurisdiction of the military courts extends to the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank over Palestinians charged with security related and criminal offences. Israeli citizens, living in those territories occupied since the 1967 war, are tried by civilian courts.

Yesh Din's website describing the Military Courts Project is here. A summary of the report, entitled Backyard Proceedings, is here along with access to the entire report in PDF.

Hat tip This Old Brit.