Anti-wall campaigner sentenced to 18 months in jail

Anti-wall campaigner sentenced to 18 months in jail

2010/10/22

Adeeb Abu Rahmah, a protest leader from Bil'in, was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment Thursday for his involvement in organizing demonstrations, local activists said. The decision aggravates the 1-year sentence originally imposed in the first instance. "Today the court of appeals has shown that it is serving as one more instance of political repression not as an actual court where justice is served. The court admitted what we all knew – that the entire system is trying to make an example of Adeeb in order to silence the entire Popular Struggle movement against Israel's occupation," defense attorney Gaby Lasky said. Abu Rahmah's sentence is the first to be handed by the Military Court of Appeals in a series of trials against anti-wall organizers. The decision is likely to affect other cases, most notably that of Abdallah Abu Rahmah, the Bil'in organizer declared human rights defender by the EU who was recently sentenced to a year in jail by the first instance of the military court. The sentence "highlights the lack of equality before the law between Israelis and Palestinians, who are tried before two different legal systems. For instance, in a case of a Jewish settler convicted of incitement to murder, the court only imposedan eight months suspended sentence," the Popular Struggle Coordination Committee said.