Gregory
I did my internship within the Addameer Prisoner Support and Human Rights Association. Addameer is an Arabic word that means “conscience”, an adequate term to describe the work of this organization which takes part in a network of Palestinian civil society actors working for the defense of the Palestinian people and thus to keep the national conscience alive. Based in Ramallah, this NGO is comprised of four units : the legal aid team works directly with detainees and their families to provide legal representation and advice to them; the documentation and research unit visits prisons in order to document the violations within the Israeli prison system; the training and awareness unit trains lawyers, prisoners and human rights activists on different topics; finally, the advocacy and lobbying office aims to engage with the international community by publishing statements, working with journalists and international organizations like the UN, and by being active on social medias.
For a month, I walked every morning for half an hour through the hilly landscape of Ramallah to get to the office. There, I would be assigned a variety of tasks. I study history and Arabic but I don’t have a background in studying law. Therefore, I worked with the advocacy and lobbying office. At the beginning of the internship, I was given a booklet on how criminal proceedings work in Israeli military courts which helped me to better understand how the Israeli judicial and prison system relies on the violation of Palestinian rights. My understanding of a global system of oppression within the courts and then prisons also deepened with my reading of the organization's reports, that I had to synthesize by writing factsheets. In this way I covered different topics including enforced disappearances of Palestinians, administrative detention as well as the new laws that have been implemented in 2023.
I also did some translation work, rewriting in French the booklet that I read when I first arrived, translating some posts for socials and some parts of the website so that the content published by Addameer could reach a bigger audience by appealing to francophone countries. The task that I remember the most is when I had to read testimonies, in Arabic, of Palestinians describing the process of their arrest by the IOF- often at their house -, their transfer to a detention facility and the living conditions within the prisons, including ill treatments and torture. Off of these readings, I had to file a complaint in English meant to be sent to the UN to report these violations. I think this is the most meaningful task I was assigned because bringing these three individual cases to international institutions might actually help them to get justice.
As I was completing my internship, the Sde Teiman scandal exposed cases of rapes of detainees by the military camp’s guards. To me, it highlighted the crucial role of organizations like Addameer.
