New concerns arise as activists discovered the EU-Israel partnership through the LAWTRAIN Project in the framework of the EU HORIZON 2020. The project is meant to unify the methodology for interrogation among Israeli and EU police forces and is a de facto normalisation of Israel’s most cruel practices, including physical and psychological torture, ill-treatment, arbitrary detention, threats, racial discrimination. With the risk of proliferation of Israeli practices in EU countries, European justice systems risk intensification of inhumane treatment, too. Recognising as legal the Israeli systems of oppression such as inhuman techniques of torture, the EU is violating its obligations under international law.
Stop the Wall started its advocacy campaign against the EU-Israeli cooperation in the framework of HORIZON 2020 in 2015. We have continued to express our concerns about the ongoing cooperation between the EU and Israel, and the LAWTRAIN project based among others on Israeli experience of illegal and inhuman techniques of interrogation is a vivid reminder to all that this cooperation has to stop now. The objective of the project is to unify methodologies of interrogation and to improve interrogation skills, as well as collaboration between police units in different countries. The risks of such a cooperation are not only the legitimation of Israeli illegal practices, but also the proliferation of racist, illegal, inhuman techniques and islamophobia in European countries.
To read more about the LAW TRAIN project see the briefing.
