A Human Rights Gain in Mideast

As Israel’s army prepares to end its 22-year-long occupation of southern Lebanon, the Israeli Supreme Court has acted to end the ordeal of a small group of Lebanese whose imprisonment has drawn sustained and warranted criticism from Israeli and international human rights advocates.

Reversing its decision of three years ago, the court ruled that Israel is not justified in holding the Lebanese as bargaining chips for Israeli military personnel missing in Lebanon. The court’s decision applied to eight of 15 detainees, and the government said it would release 13 of the prisoners today. The remaining two are high-ranking officials of Lebanese guerrilla movements that have fought the Israeli occupation and are being held in a military prison.

All of the Lebanese were abducted from their homeland. Some have been held for as long as 13 years, most of the time under administrative detention, meaning incarceration without charge or trial. The high court found that the detainees whose cases it considered posed no danger to state security. In fact the government has never made a secret of its hope that the men--some as young as 16 when they were seized--could someday be swapped for four missing Israelis, three of whom have not been seen since 1982.

The idea of using prisoners for purposes of political or monetary extortion has become all too familiar. Iran tore up the rules of diplomatic immunity in 1979 when it allowed the U.S. Embassy in Tehran to be taken over by a radical mob and its personnel made captives.

The Lebanese civil war saw countless kidnappings by one or another of its many political factions, the most notorious involving Islamic extremists’ seizure of Americans working in Lebanon. Israel’s bargaining chips were in fact hostages, and its Supreme Court recognized in 1997 that their detention was an offense to human rights. It held at that time that the security of the state justified these abuses. Its reversal of that decision rectifies a major wrong and sets a precedent that will limit the arbitrary actions of future Israeli governments.