Israeli judge rules against unfair conviction of Arab boy

Bangkok News.Net
Monday 16th November, 2009

An Israeli judge has granted protection from the justice system to an Arab teenager who threw stones at a police car during a protest last month.

The judge has ordered that the youth not be convicted despite being found guilty of the offence, which occurred during a demonstration over the Israeli attack on Gaza earlier this year.

The youth, a 17 year old, was arrested during a protest on a road near Nazareth a few days after Israel launched its operation in Gaza last December.

He could have been sent to prison for 20 years had the judge allowed the conviction to stand.

The judge ruled that while prosecutors wanted to deter other members of Israel’s Arab minority from committing similar offences, he would not jail the minor because it would be a case of the Israeli state "caressing with one hand the Jewish ideological felons, and flogging with its other hand the Arab ideological felons."

Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors in similar matters had become unbalanced.

He referred to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.

The legal group acting for Israel’s Arab minority has said it will now use the ruling to assist it in proving that the Israeli state has pursued a policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab citizens.

The prosecution has announced it will appeal against the decision.

Have your say on this story