Detainees
Written by Theresa Thornhill Published by Lawyers for Palestinian Human Rights. Price £5.99 Reviewed by Terry Conway MAKING Women Talk doesn't make cosy bed-time reading. My apprehension that within this thin volume I would find graphic descriptions of the agony and anguish endured by women involved in the Intifada proved correct.
The book outlines the legal tramowork within which security of.
With widespread recruitment freezes and severe financial cutbacks over the last few years, the practice has mushroomed, and nowhere more so than Mirror Group. For many journalists made redundant in the recession, shifts were an obvious lifeline.
But casual workers have virtually no legal rights. While the money is relatively good, there fences are tried, and catalogues the interrogation methods, often using extensive quotes from the women themselves.
It comments on the atitudes of the military personnel involved to the women in their custody. The humilation of sexual harassment the degradation of courts in which your interpreter is one of the enemy. result of torture are powortul depicted and damned on these Pa hornill analyses the indings of the Landau commission, set up by the Israeli government in 1987 to investigate the methods of the security services in dealing with "Terrorist offences following revelatons of obstruction of a previous in. quiry into a summary execution by security forces of two Palestinians involved in a hi-jacking She is damning in her judgement of this report, which concluded that the use of psychological and "moderate physical pressure of those suspected of hostile terrorist activity was not orly necessary but permissible under the law as it stood.
She points out that the published recommendations of the report amount to an acceptance that state security can only be maintained if the judiciary countenances cornictons based purety on confession evidence obtained by the use of torture, as well as alluding to the sinister existence of an secret ap pendix which outines a code of guidelines of precisely what is and is not permitted - or perhaps it should read what can and cant be got away with!
The weakness of the text is not mainly that it is couched within a legalistic framework - indood the cataloguing of israel's many breaches of the Geneva Conventon is a powertul part of the argument -but the fact that its conclusion peters out into insisting that the only appropriate action for readers of the ook is international lobbying hornhill's book can provide in spiration and ammunition to anyone aho supports the cause of the Palestrian poopio. Don't be bound by her conclusions but read the book.