Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-07-09-Speech-3-360"
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"en.20080709.35.3-360"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we put a simple question to 47 Members from different political groups: what are the Council and the Commission intending to do about the violations of international conventions by the Israeli authorities as regards Palestinian prisoners? The vast majority of prisoners are detained in Israeli territory, violating Article 76 of the Geneva Convention: arbitrary arrests, house-to-house searches, administrative detention, torture and abuse during interrogations in detention centres. Men, women, teenagers, students, MPs and mayors, some 10 000 people imprisoned out of a population of three and a half million; there is a ban on visits for those aged between 16 and 35, with the result that prisoners have not been able to see brothers, sisters, mothers and fathers for years.
All this has been documented by international organisations including Amnesty International, the United Nations and admirable Israeli organisations such as B’Tselem and Hamoked, and by Palestinian organisations such as Addameer and Defence for Children International. However, no pressure is being exerted on the Israeli authorities to respect the conventions and the rules that they are themselves ratifying and that we are also ratifying.
I should like to read an account, an appeal from a mother: ‘I am the mother of the prisoner Said Al Atabeh, of Nablus. My son has been in jail since 1977, and I am 78 and suffer from high blood pressure and diabetes; I am losing my sight and cannot really get around my own home any more. Perhaps you will be surprised but my only desire in this life is to see my son and give him a loving embrace before I die. All my children, sons and daughters, are now grown up, married and have left my home. Said has lost everything and I cannot see him, not because I am old and ill, but because the Israeli authorities will not let me have a permit to visit him, on security grounds, they say. I have only been able to visit Said once, when I was taken by an Israeli ambulance in cooperation with the Red Cross, and that was eight years ago after he had been in prison for 29 years. That was the first and last time that I embraced my beloved son. He took me in his arms and said “Mama, it is as though I am being born into this life again”. Those minutes were the most precious for me and for him, but the moment when we were separated from one another was the hardest and most painful’. This mother makes an appeal: ‘I should like to see him once again’.
Can we allow this? Can a man who has been in prison for 32 years be prevented from seeing his mother? Where are the international rules? Where is the humanity, I ask myself? I believe that as the Council, as the Commission, as Parliament, we have to stand our ground and say as forcefully as we can that the international rules have to be respected, that Palestinian prisoners, and as I have said there are 10 000 of them, must be freed to pave the way for peace between Palestinians and Israelis."@en1
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