Shurat HaDin

Shurat HaDin – Israel Law Center

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Esq., Founder & Director
Type	non-profit organization
Industry	Civil rights
Founded	2000, Jerusalem, Israel
Products	Fighting Global Terror Via the Courts
Website	http://www.israellawcenter.org

Shurat HaDin, Israel Law Center (ILC), founded in 2003, is a Tel Aviv-based non-governmental organization focused on using litigation against groups that they accuse of supporting terrorism.

History

When Shurat Hadin was founded in 2003 its stated purpose was to "combat terrorism and promote civil rights through research, education and litigation."

According to its founder, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, its creation was inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States, which used civil litigation to cripple and bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan, and other neo-Nazi groups in the US.

Organization

Shurat HaDin is staffed with activist Israeli attorneys and works with numerous other law offices internationally which serve as co-counsel on cases being litigated in courtrooms in the U.S, Canada, Israel and elsewhere.

Prominent cases

Shurat HaDin Israel Law Center has been involved in a range of legal actions in Israel and abroad on behalf of civil rights cases.

Sderot

On January 7, 2008, ten families of Sderot (Israel) residents, whose relatives were killed or seriously injured by Palestinian Qassam rockets, filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian government in the Be'er Sheva District Court seeking compensation in the amount of NIS 260,000,000 ($65,000,000 US). The court complaint accuses Egypt of intentionally assisting what it calls Palestinian terror organizations in smuggling explosives and weapons into the Hamas controlled Gaza strip.

The plaintiffs argue that Cairo assists the organizations by authorizing the smuggling of tons of explosives and thousands of weapons into Gaza. They also argued that the Egyptian government allowed what the group called terrorists to cross back and forth from the Egyptian-held Sinai into Gaza, permitting them an open route to and from what Shurat HaDin asserted to be terrorist training bases in states like Iran, Lebanon and Syria.

Alien Torts Act and the Torture Victims Protection Act

On September 10, 2006, Shurat HaDin and New York attorney Robert Tolchin filed a law suit in federal court on behalf of the families of 12 missing Iranian Jews against the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. The complaint alleges that the former president was responsible for the kidnapping and torture of their missing family members in Iran. The families, currently residing in Los Angeles and Israel, claim that Khatami instituted the cruel policy of making Iranian Jewish detainees "disappear" – that is imprisoning Iranian Jews without trials and refusing to provide their families any information concerning their arrests, status or whereabouts.

The families of the missing Jews, who are not U.S. citizens, brought the suit under special laws – the Alien Tort Statute and the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991 – which permit foreigners to sue their tormentors for torture and kidnapping in American courts. The plaintiffs are seeking hundreds of millions of dollars in damages against Khatami for what they assert to be his role in the on-going disappearance of their relatives. Khatami has refused to answer the complaint and has defaulted the case.

Israeli collaborators

On May 1, 2008, Shurat HaDin along with former Soviet refusenik, Ida Nudel launched a public campaign to save the life of a Palestinian police officer accused of having assisted the Israeli intelligence services in hunting down fugitive terrorists. The policeman, Imad Sa'ad has been sentenced to death by a Palestinian military tribunal in Hebron. Sa'ad, it is alleged, provided the Israel Defense Forces with the whereabouts of four suspected bomb makers whom the Palestinian Authority was unwilling to hand over to the Israelis.

Shurat HaDin accused the Palestinians of having engaged in a show trial that did not permit the defendant, a father of four, the right to counsel nor the right to call witnesses in his defense. There are no appeals from Palestinian military tribunals, even in capital cases^{[citation needed]}. Darshan-Leitner and Nudel wrote to then-president George W. Bush, the European Union and the Vatican to ask for their support.

UBS bank

On May 13, 2008, Shurat HaDin was co-counsel in filing in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Swiss bank, UBS which is accused by the plaintiffs of financing terror.

The plaintiffs in the case, all of whom had family members injured or killed in Israel, allege that UBS's unlawful eight year-long provision of financial services to the Islamic Republic of Iran at the time that the group allege that Tehran was providing material support to terrorist organizations renders the Swiss bank liable for the harm that has been inflicted upon them and their families. This was the first civil action brought by what the group allege to be American victims of Katyusha rocket attacks by Hezbollah.

The group alleges that the Swiss bank was involved in transferring dollars to regimes such as Iran, Cuba, and North Korea. The UBS operation was uncovered by American soldiers in Iraq in 2003 who discovered brand new dollars, still wrapped in Federal Reserve casings behind a wall in Saddam Huessein's palace^{[citation needed]}. A Federal Reserve investigation of the currency determined that UBS was responsible for illegally transferring between $4 to $5 billion to states designated by the U.S. as sponsors of terrorism between 1996 and 2004^{[citation needed]}. At first UBS sought to deny the extent of the money transfers it had provided to Iran and others^{[citation needed]}, but confronted with overwhelming evidence, eventually was compelled to admit the scope of its criminal activities^{[citation needed]}. UBS, one of world's wealthiest banks, was fined $100 millions by the Federal Reserve for its conduct^{[citation needed]}. The lawsuit charges UBS, which has a branch in New York, with aiding and abetting what the group allege to be Iran's support of terrorism, by illegally providing Tehran the dollars it needed to pass along to the terrorist groups for their purchases and attacks.

Iranian families and diplomats

On June 30, 2008, Shurat HaDin filed a petition in the Israeli High Court of Justice on behalf of the families of 12 missing Iranian Jews seeking to block the Israeli government from releasing information on the fate of four disappeared Iranian diplomats as part of a prisoner exchange deal with Hezbollah. The petition was heard on Wednesday, July 2, 2008. The Jews were arrested in the 1990s as they sought to escape from Iran across the border with Pakistan and they are believed to still be in Iranian prisons. The Iranian diplomats were captured by Christian militia forces, the Samir Geagea faction, in South Lebanon in 1982^{[citation needed]}.

The petition demands that the Prime Minister not authorize the transfer of information regarding the diplomats until such time as reliable and detailed information is received about the missing Jews' fate. The families of the missing Jews have never received any acknowledgment of their loved ones' arrests, status or whereabouts from the Islamic regime^{[citation needed]}.

Shurat Hadin claims it has reliable information that at least one of the Jews is still alive and being held as a prisoner in Tehran. The families contend that the government must honor the obligations imposed upon it by the Israeli High Court approximately two years ago, in a prior High Court proceeding, that [the Israeli government] "...push forward diligently without sparing any effort in order to gain information about the [12 missing] Jews of Iran." The families are insisting that there be a "quid pro quo" on information about their family members in exchange for the release of the details on the fate of the missing Iranians.

Shurat HaDin emphasized that, the families' are not appealing against the deal to bring back the Hizbollah captives itself but rather are demanding that the fate of the 12 missing Jews be included as a "quid pro quo" before any information about the diplomats is released.

American Express Bank and Lebanese-Canadian Bank

On July 14, 2008, Shurat HaDin and Attorney Robert Tolchin of New York filed suit against American Express Bank accusing it of a role in transferring money for Hizbollah. The action was filed in the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Representing some 85 victims and their family members, the Shurat HaDin law suit alleges that the American Express Bank, Ltd. and the Lebanese-Canadian Bank (LCB) unlawfully executed millions of dollars in wire transfers for Hizbollah between 2004 and 2006. The plaintiffs assert that Hizbollah used the funds transferred by Amex Bank and LCB to prepare and carry out the rocket attacks which the terrorist organization rained on Israeli cities between July 12 and August 14, 2006.

The plaintiffs rested their claims in part on written findings issued by the New York State Banking Department in 2007, which determined that Amex Bank had failed to establish adequate procedures to prevent terrorism financing as demanded by state and federal law. This was the first lawsuit brought by victims of terrorism against a U.S. financial institution, alleging that they served as a correspondent for a bank in Lebanon.

External links

• Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center Official Website