Denying Palestinian laborers access to justice [View all]

[Little Tich]

Source: +972Mag

A new Israeli labor regulation continues a trend of increasingly suspending rule of law for Palestinians in the West Bank, in this case leading to further segregation in access the courts.

In the Israeli economy, dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs often are left to some 170,000 foreign workers, among them 55,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank. Numerous NGO reports and media exposes have documented the abuses faced by these workers. Yet the most vulnerable and exploited segment of Israel’s labor force now faces yet another barrier to justice: in August, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked issued a new regulation requiring most foreign workers to deposit a financial guarantee as a condition to proceed with lawsuits against their employers in the country’s labor courts. As a result, whatever rights these workers should enjoy by law will likely be too expensive to actually enforce.

Shaked and her Jewish Home party have made plain the political agenda behind the rule: to thwart an imagined “lawsuit intifada” of legal claims by Palestinians working in the Jordan Valley settlements against their Israeli employers. Adalah, the Workers’ Hotline, and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel jointly filed a petition to Israel’s Supreme Court challenging this regulation, which blatantly discriminates on the basis of national origin. Under this regulation, Israeli and foreign workers would be subjected to different standards for pursuing their rights, even when performing the same tasks for the same employers side-by-side.

Moreover, Shaked adopted the regulation in a breathtakingly arbitrary fashion, without any public consultation or debate. It comes as little surprise then that the regulation also violates the separation of powers. Israeli law permits the government to set some procedural rules for the country’s labor courts but the Jordan Valley regulation so dramatically tilts the scales of justice in favor of employers that it changes the substantive rights involved. Moreover, the regulation disregards numerous court precedents stressing that the requirement of a financial guarantee should only be used in exceptional circumstances when judges determine that plaintiffs would refuse to pay legal fees if they lose or are engaging in frivolous lawsuits. This regulation usurps the legislature’s role and unreasonably eliminates judicial discretion only in order to obstruct access to court for foreign workers, especially Palestinians.

The new labor regulation is part of a disturbing trend in recent years to increasingly suspend the rule of law with regard to Palestinians in the West Bank, leading to increased segregation in access the courts for the enforcement of their rights.

Read more: http://972mag.com/denying-palestinian-laborers-access-to-justice/122319/