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The European War on Israel's Courts: The Role of Foreign-Funded NGOs in the Israeli Legal System

(Jerusalem Post) Anne Herzberg - NGO Monitor has discovered massive funding provided by the UK, the EU and Norway to the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), which in turn is funneled to local NGOs in order to flood Israeli courts with hundreds of lawsuits. Since 2011, these governments have provided the NRC with $20 million to wage legal warfare on Israel, funding at least 700 cases in Israeli courts. In a public presentation, an NRC-affiliated lawyer commented that the strategy behind the project is to undertake "every possible legal measure to disrupt the Israeli judicial system...to increase the workload of the courts and the Supreme Court to such an extent that there will be a blockage." In other words, the objective is to sabotage the Israeli justice system. The NRC has also used this funding to attack the Canadian justice system. In 2008, a lawsuit was filed in Quebec seeking to hold two Canadian companies guilty of aiding and abetting alleged "Israeli war crimes." The courts fined the plaintiffs and threw their frivolous case out of court. Refusing to accept Canadian rule of law, the NRC then filed a complaint to the UN Human Rights Council claiming that Canada had violated human rights by dismissing the lawsuit. It is inconceivable that the UK, the EU, Norway, or any other European country would countenance mass foreign state funding for hundreds of lawsuits in their courts on the most contentious policy and security issues. Imagine the reaction of the British government if it learned that Germany or France was providing tens of millions of euros to the IRA to finance hundreds of lawsuits in British courts challenging its policies in Northern Ireland. The writer is the legal advisor of NGO Monitor.
2014-03-07 00:00:00
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