The Palestine Center for Prisoners Studies said today, Saturday, that the occupation courts continued during the year 2020 to drain the families of prisoners in light of the difficult economic conditions experienced by the Palestinian people, by imposing financial fines against children in the Ofer court, which amounted to (350) One thousand shekels since the beginning of this year, equivalent to (102 thousand dollars).
And Riad Al-Ashqar, director of the center, stated that the majority of children who are arrested and brought before the courts impose financial fines on them, in addition to actual prison sentences, as the fines have become a great financial burden on the children´s families and an arbitrary punishment practiced by the occupation courts against them, with the aim of overburdening them.
Al-Ashqar explained that the military judiciary plays an active and complicit role in serving the security orientations and provides legal protection for occupation policies that violate international law, through mock courts that provide a formal legal framework for the Shin Bet to issue retaliatory and harsh rulings against our people and deplete their exorbitant financial resources.
He considered the imposition of exorbitant financial fines on child prisoners in prisons by the Israeli courts as a clear, programmed and approved political robbery operation aimed at plundering and collecting money from the prisoners´ families in order to pressure and blackmail the prisoners and their families, and overburden them with the bill resulting from the arrest of their children in the occupation prisons to prevent them from participating in resisting the occupation.
He pointed out that the arbitrary courts of the occupation impose financial fines for the trivial reasons, in order to punish the prisoners and install a harsh deterrent policy, even if the case against which the prisoner is tried is very simple, such as throwing stones or being near military checkpoints and settlements, it does not intercede for the prisoner to impose a heavy fine on him for his release. And there is hardly a sentence without a fine.
The researcher Al-Ashqar said that these fines did not exclude any of the categories of prisoners, including female prisoners, as the occupation uses them as a drain on the families of the prisoners, and an attempt to restrict their livelihood, which disturbs the families, and constitutes a new nightmare for them, and a source of pressure, in light of the difficult economic conditions that the people are suffering from. The Palestinian Authority, especially that if these fines are not paid, they are replaced by an additional prison term for their children.
Al-Ashkar called on the human rights organizations concerned with children´s rights to intervene urgently in order to put an end to the detention of Palestinian children in harsh conditions, and to blackmail their families to pay money in exchange for their release.
