When people hear the words corruption they immediately think of money or patrimony. The financial mismanagement and the doling out of jobs on the basis of who you know rather than what you know is commonplace both in Palestine and around the world. A type of corruption that is often overlooked is what is known as scape-goating or blaming subordinates for one’s own mismanagement.

People don’t always think of this as corruption because unlike mismanaging national finances and labor markets, this type usually only directly affects a small number of people; namely those being scape-goated. For the rest of us it is only a spectacle, a bogus attempt by the government to cover up a catastrophe by placing impossible blame on the shoulders of a few so that the rest can carry on as usual. Scape-goating is a ‘pleasant corruption’; it leaves everyone feeling resolved.

Despite the convenience of the tactic and the relative ease by which the public accept it, this type of corruption does affect more than the poor men or women (and their families) whose heads are on the chopping block. First off, scape-goating destroys the prospect for real accountability. Once the blame for an uncomfortable situation, or indeed a catastrophe which occurred in Gaza over the summer, is shifted to a convenient victim, the event tends to be swept under the rug. Meanwhile, there is no real understanding as to why such an event has occurred or any reason to believe that it will not occur again.

There is more at stake than the accountability of politicians as well. Indeed, the manner in which scape-goating occurs inherently damages the judicial system as well. Because a jury, or sometimes a single judge, must place a large amount of blame where it does not belong, the regular procedures cannot be applied. In order to make ‘the square peg fit into the round hole’, the court must be removed from the public eye; evidence, if any exists is not shared with the defendants and the right to appeal is removed.

The court room is a place where precedence is valued. The decisions made in court rooms yesterday affect the way in which decisions will be made tomorrow. Whatever tomorrow brings, I hope today’s actions are not setting a precedence for Palestinian political and judicial accountability.

Mr. Sawalha was the 3rd in command of the presidential guard stationed in Gaza during the events of the past June. In order to appease the public Abbas sacked several high ranking security officials but the event has proven so catastrophic that more heads must roll. Now it is Mr. Sawalha’s turn along with seven other subordinates. He has served in the Presidential Guard since its creation1994, and with Fatah 35 years. He has been accused of being in dereliction of his duties, and when this charge did not stick, he was then accused of not following orders. As to those duties, according to military leaders and leaders of the PLO, Mr. Sawalha was doing exactly as he was supposed to be and was indeed ‘the last one out’ just like the captains in the movies. As to the second charge of not following orders, the prosecution has been unable to provide any orders whatsoever which were given and not followed.

They brought him in front of a judge anyway. Time after time the case was dismissed due to lack of evidence. So the court began taking much more severe steps to make sure the blame landed where they wanted it to. They brought in a new judge, who is in fact not a judge but the head of the military judiciary, particularly inconvenient since this is the same person to whom Mr. Sawalha would have to plead to for permission to appeal his case.

Mr. Sawalha has a good lawyer, who had been telling him and his family that everything was going to be fine, that this was just a mix up and there was no evidence by which to accuse him of anything much less convict him.

That was then.

The new judge and the new rules state that the defendant is no longer allowed to see the evidence against him. The lawyer was given the opportunity to review an 80 page document in a matter of a couple of hours but not make copies. The defense has not been allowed to attend all meetings with the judge in which the prosecution is present, nor does he feel confident that his wish to call witnesses will be respected. All of this flies in the face the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), in which article 14 states that “everyone shall be entitled to a fair and public hearing by a competent, independent and impartial tribunal established by law.”

In sum the accused may now just as well drop his lawyer and pay an imam to come and pray because he is no longer in a court of law and this is out of his hands. He is a scapegoat now, not a defendant, and has about as good a shot at a proper defense as those hundreds languishing in Guantanamo Bay.

So what does this case mean? For eight families it means uncertainty now which could be followed by heartache later. For Palestinians in general it means one more step down in the decline of the judicial system. When precedence like these continue to damage the credibility of the law there is little left to hold on to. Politicians change with the season, but the law and legal rights should remain solid and firm so that regular citizens can defend themselves against the powerful.

Joseph DeVoir is a full-time volunteer for the Combatants for Peace and a part-time consultant for the Palestinian Centre for Peace and Democracy in Ramallah.