GENEVA: United Nations experts on Wednesday called on Israel to withdraw a bill proposing the mandatory death penalty for terrorist acts, warning it would violate the right to life and discriminate against Palestinians.
Israel’s parliament last November passed a first reading of a draft amendment to the country’s penal code, demanded by far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir.
“Mandatory death sentences are contrary to the right to life,” a dozen independent UN rights experts warned in a statement.
“By removing judicial and prosecutorial discretion, they prevent a court from considering the individual circumstances, including mitigating factors, and from imposing a proportionate sentence that fits the crime,” they said.
While the death penalty exists for a small number of crimes in Israel, it has become a de facto abolitionist country: the last person to be executed was the Nazi Holocaust perpetrator Adolf Eichmann in 1962.
But the amendment, which must pass a second and third reading before becoming law, would change that and would introduce two tracks for the death penalty in Israel, a dozen independent UN rights experts warned in a statement.
In the occupied West Bank, the statement said “the death penalty would be imposed by military courts under military law for terrorist acts causing the death of a person, even if not intended.”
In Israel and occupied East Jerusalem, meanwhile, capital punishment would continue to be applied only under Israeli criminal law and only for the “intentional killing of Israeli citizens or residents.”
‘Vague and overbroad’
The experts’ statement warned that under both tracks, “vague and overbroad definitions of terrorist offenses under Israeli law would apply, which can include conduct that is not genuinely terrorist, and the death penalty would be mandatory.”
The experts, including Francesca Albanese, the special rapporteur for the rights situation in the occupied Palestinian territories, stressed that unintentional killings were not considered among the “most serious” crimes to which the death penalty can be applied under international law.
“Since Israeli military trials of civilians typically do not meet fair trial standards under international human rights law and humanitarian law, any resulting death sentence would further violate the right to life,” said the experts, who also included the special rapporteurs for protecting rights while countering terrorism and for extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions.
“Denial of a fair trial is also a war crime,” they stressed.
The independent experts, who are mandated by the UN Human Rights Council but who do not speak on behalf of the United Nations, also warned that “the bill makes matters worse by allowing death sentences to be imposed by a simple majority vote of military judges.”
Hamas said in November that the proposed law “embodies the ugly fascist face of the rogue Zionist occupation and represents a blatant violation of international law.”
The Ramallah-based Palestinian foreign ministry called it a “new form of escalating Israeli extremism and criminality against the Palestinian people.”