Rights Group Decries Palestinian Abuses in Gaza : Mideast: Arafat government’s actions threaten peace, report says. It cites prisoner deaths, political arrests.

A leading human rights group warned Sunday that the failure of the 7-month-old Palestinian Authority to protect human rights in the Gaza Strip seriously threatens the establishment of a Palestinian democracy and prospects for stable peace in the Middle East.

In its first detailed assessment of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s rule, the New York-based Human Rights Watch said the Palestinian Authority has made sweeping political arrests, mistreated prisoners, censored the press and failed to curb abuses of power in Gaza and the West Bank town of Jericho.

A Palestinian suspected of collaborating with Israel during its 27-year occupation of the Gaza Strip was tortured to death in July, the group charged, and a second died under what appear to be similar circumstances last month.

The 50-page report also assailed the Palestinian police’s use of lethal measures to control a Gaza City riot Nov. 18 in which 13 people were killed.

The most troubling problem now, according to the report, is the increasing use of mass political arrests by the authority in response to continuing attacks by Islamic militants on Israeli soldiers and civilians. The arrests are leading to detention without trial and to beatings of prisoners, the group charged.

Acknowledging both the Palestine Liberation Organization’s need to prevent those attacks and the heavy pressure from Israel to take firmer action, Human Rights Watch said the authority “must fulfill this obligation through means that are consistent with basic human rights rather than resorting to such means as indiscriminate roundups of suspected opposition supporters.”

Suicide bombers from the Islamic Resistance Movement, known as Hamas, and from Islamic Jihad, both of which oppose the self-government agreement the PLO signed with Israel in September, 1993, have killed more than 50 Israelis in the last year.

Eric Goldstein, the Middle East research director for Human Rights Watch, said Arafat’s order last week setting up a state security court staffed by military personnel, largely in response to Israeli pressure, is worrisome as “a denial of basic rights and due process, a rejection of the rule of law.”

“They have yet to try to make the civilian courts work,” Goldstein said. “To be establishing military courts suggests they are abandoning commitments they have made to protect human rights. Nobody has been brought before any court yet, not for political violence, not for collaborating with Israel.”

Col. Hassan abu Libdeh, director general of the authority’s Justice Ministry, said the new court would “confront all violations of national security” and that a further decree would define its powers.

Al Haq, the West Bank affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, denounced the proposed court as “a serious attack on the independence of the judiciary and the rule of law as well as on the human rights of Palestinians.”

“This move by the Palestinian Authority threatens the very foundation of Palestinian civil and political rights,” Al Haq said. “The creation of Palestinian military courts is particularly offensive, as it is reminiscent of Israeli military courts, which have so totally undermined judicial independence throughout the years of occupation.

“Further, the use of security courts and tribunals has been identified by human rights activists as one of the most serious sources of human rights violations in the Arab world.”

Human Rights Watch did praise initial steps, such as Red Cross visits to prisoners, licenses for opposition newspapers and freedom of political debate, that the authority has taken to ensure observance of international human rights conventions.

It also acknowledged the Palestinian security forces’ lack of experience, training and equipment. “But these handicaps cannot fully explain or excuse the emerging patterns of human rights violations nor justify the failure to take certain actions to protect rights,” the group said.

Asserting that after more than six months the Palestinian Authority “has yet to anchor its conduct in the rule of law,” Human Rights Watch urged it to publish the full body of laws in force and to repeal any that violate basic human rights, such as a ban on unauthorized political meetings.

Saeb Erekat, the authority’s minister for local government, said several government committees, as well as the independent Palestinian Commission on Human Rights, are investigating reports of beatings during interrogation and the death of suspected collaborators while in custody.

“We want to work to halt such problems wherever they might exist,” Erekat said. “We intend to build a democracy that will operate under the rule of law and that will respect fully human rights. . . . We are still young, not yet sovereign and still under occupation in much of our territory.”

Human Rights Watch, which has sharply criticized rights violations during the long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, said that Israel shares the blame for the situation in the Palestinian territories.

“Israel’s responsibilities toward the Gazans did not evaporate with the redeployment of its troops,” said Christopher E. George, the group’s Middle East director.