Montreal, January 23, 2014  — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) implores the Canadian government to address the Syrian civil war with urgency and greater substance.  Earlier this week, a report by renowned international war crimes judges, with the aid of forensic scientists, confirmed evidence of massive torture of prisoners committed by the Assad regime.  The thousands of photos document severe beatings, starvation and strangulation. This report makes meaningful involvement by Canada even more urgent.  Canada must press both sides of the Syrian conflict to respect human rights and international humanitarian law.

Montreal, February 26, 2013  — Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East (CJPME) calls on Canadian MPs to speak out against the apparent torture-death Saturday of a 30-year-old Palestinian man in the custody of Israeli authorities. “This prisoner’s death is horribly reminiscent of black detainees’ deaths in apartheid-era South Africa,” says CJPME President Thomas Woodley. The IDF and Shin Bet (Israel’s domestic intelligence agency) arrested Arafat Jaradat (30) at his home in the small town of Sa’eer, near Al-Khalil (Hebron) at midnight on February 18, alleging that he had thrown stones at cars carrying Israelis from a nearby “settlement.” A doctor present at the autopsy conducted by Israel’s forensics institute in Tel Aviv reports that Jaradat’s body displayed signs of beatings in the days prior to his death.

CJPME Factsheet 54, published February, 2009: This factsheet looks at the World Medical Association (WMA), an international organization that determines the proper ethical conduct physicians should abide by at all times. The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) signed WMA’s Declaration of Tokyo in 1975, which prohibits the participation of physicians in interrogations and torture of any kind. Dr. Yoram Blachar, long-standing president of the IMA, was inaugurated as President of the World Medical Association (WMA) in 2008. Many have since called on Dr. Blachar to step down as head of the WMA, since doctors in Israel continue to play an integral role in the everyday running of Israeli interrogation suites that include cruel and inhumane treatment and humiliation amounting to torture.

CJPME Factsheet 38, published May 2008: The UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment defines torture as any act which intentionally inflicts severe mental or physical pain on a victim for the purpose of obtaining information or a confession or for punishing the victim for conduct or suspected conduct. The UN convention was preceded by a long series of other conventions such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 7), and conventions dealing with the laws of war, all of which strictly prohibit torture and other types of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment and punishment under any circumstances.