23-year-old Mohammad Faisal Abu Sakha has been held by the Israeli military without any contact with his family since late last year. He hasn’t been charged with a crime and the authorities refuse to give a reason for his detention. On December 14 Mohammad set out from his parents’ home to the Palestinian Circus School where he works. But he never made it. Israeli soldiers stopped him at a checkpoint and took him to a nearby detention center. He has been held ever since, and is now thought to be in Megiddo prison, in northern Israel.

Israeli circus performers demanding the release of Palestinian colleague Abu Sakha (Photo: Al Ittihad)

He has never been charged with a crime and his family has not been allowed to visit him. The Israeli military handed him a six-month administrative detention order – so they can continue to hold him with no charge, indefinitely. A military judge can cancel, reduce, uphold or renew the order. Abu Sakha’s order is understood to have been reviewed on January 5 but no decision has yet been made. On the day of the reported review, Al Jazeera quoted an Israeli military spokesperson as saying that Abu Sakha was being held because he posed a “danger… to the security of the region.” He did not provide any further information, saying that the details of his case were “confidential.”

This is common in cases of administrative detention, as those held are denied the right to defend themselves or effectively challenge the legality of their detention because the authorities largely withhold the “evidence” against them – not just from the detainee themselves but also from their lawyers. The Palestinian Circus School has said that there is no basis to claims that Mohammad is a security threat, that his only crime is “making children happy” and that his life is dedicated to the circus. Abu Sakha began studying at the school in 2007. When he was 17 he was arrested and held for one month by Israeli Security forces, who accused him of throwing stones at an Israeli military jeep when he was aged between 12 and 14. He told his school colleagues that, during his detention, a military judge told him he would “never go back to the circus.”

But in 2011 he became one of the school’s performers who also trains children in circus acts. He specializes in teaching children with learning disabilities, who make up 30 of the more than 300 students at the school. Established in 2006, the school’s mission is to train Palestinian children and youth in circus arts and thereby “strengthen the social, creative and physical potential of the Palestinians, seeking to engage and empower them to become constructive actors in society.” It is funded by various charities and other bodies, including the European Commission.

Administrative detention was supposed to act as an exceptional measure to detain people who pose an extreme and imminent danger to security. But for years it’s been used by Israel as a way of sidestepping the criminal justice system and detaining people who should never have been arrested. The authorities have increased their use of administrative detention dramatically since October 2015: over 580 Palestinians were being held by the end of last year. According to Amnesty International “We believe that some Palestinians held in administrative detention by Israel are prisoners of conscience, held solely for the peaceful exercise of their right to freedom of expression and association.”

Related:

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/actions/free-palestinian-circus-performer-held-israel