The Supreme Court has relaunched long -standing prosecution against the Palestinian authorities of the Americans killed or injured during attacks in Israel and the occupied West Bank.
The United States Supreme Court has confirmed a law adopted by the Congress to facilitate prosecution against the Palestinian authorities by Americans killed or injured during attacks abroad while complainants have monetary damages for violence in Israel and occupied West Bank.
Decision 9-0 canceled the decision of a lower court according to which the law of 2019, the law on security and justice for the victims of terrorism, violated the rights of the organization of the liberation of the Palestinian authority and the liberation of Palestine under the American Constitution.
The conservative chief judge John Roberts, who is the author of the decision, said that the 2019 jurisdictional law included with rights to a regular procedure devoted in the fifth amendment to the Constitution.
“The federal government is allowed to write a close jurisdictional provision which guarantees, within the framework of a broader foreign policy program, that the Americans injured or killed by acts of terror have an adequate forum in which to justify their right” in Roberts.
The American government and a group of American victims and their families had appealed the decision of the lower court which canceled a provision of the law.
Among the complainants are families who, in 2015, won a judgment of $ 655 million in a civil affair alleging that Palestinian organizations were responsible for a series of fire and bombing around Jerusalem from 2002 to 2004. They also include parents of Ari Fuld, a Jewish colonist in 2018.
The decision occurs even if the Jewish colonies on land belonging to Palestinians are considered illegal under international law.
“The complainants, the American families who had mutilated or murdered relatives in terrorist attacks sponsored by the OLL, have been waiting for justice for many years,” said Kent Yalowitz, lawyer for the complainants.
“I hope that the case will soon be resolved without submitting these families to a prolonged and unnecessary dispute,” added Yalowitz.
The War during Israel in Gaza, and now Iran, has served as a backdrop in the case. Since the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, more than 55,000 people have been killed and 130,000 injured, according to the Gaza Ministry of Health.
The American courts for years have attacked whether they have jurisdiction in cases involving the Palestinian authority and the PLO for the measures taken abroad.
Under the language in question in the 2019 law, PLO and the Palestinian authority automatically “consents” to the court if they put certain activities in the United States or carry out payments to the people who attack the Americans.
Roberts, in Friday’s decision, wrote that the Congress and the President promulgated the jurisdictional law on the basis of their “judgment considered as the PLO and the AP (Palestinian Authority) for the responsibility of the American courts within the framework of a complete legal response to arrest, interrupt and disturb the acts of international terrorism which threatens the life and members of the American citizens”.
The American district judge based in New York, Jesse Furman, judged in 2022 that the law violated the rights of the regular PLO and the Palestinian Authority. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeal, based in New York, confirmed this decision.
President Joe Biden’s administration launched the government’s appeal, which was then taken over by the administration of President Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case on April 1.