Home » UN Rights Chief Labels Israel’s Death Penalty Bill a ‘War Crime’

UN Rights Chief Labels Israel’s Death Penalty Bill a ‘War Crime’

The United Nations’ top rights official has strongly criticized the Israeli parliament’s passage of a “deeply discriminatory” new death penalty bill, warning that enforcing it in occupied Palestinian territory would amount to a war crime.
A new law, which would make the death penalty the standard punishment for Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank found guilty of deliberately carrying out deadly attacks deemed “acts of terrorism” by an Israeli military court, “is fundamentally at odds with Israel’s international law commitments”, Volker Turk stated in a statement.
“Implementing it for residents of the occupied Palestinian territory would constitute a war crime,” he said.
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, a prominent Israeli human rights organization, has submitted a petition to the country’s Supreme Court to challenge the bill.
It argues that its basis for contesting the bill is that Israel lacks the authority to “legislate for the West Bank” and that the law is unconstitutional, as it “violates … rights safeguarded under [Israel’s] Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty”.

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