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78-439: Lawfare is the use of legal systems and institutions to damage or delegitimize an opponent, or to deter an individual's usage of their legal rights. The term may refer to the use of legal systems and principles against an enemy, such as by damaging or delegitimizing them, wasting their time and money (e.g., strategic lawsuits against public participation ), or winning a public relations victory. Alternatively, it may describe

156-583: A British charity that does humanitarian work for Palestinians (and others), was taken to court in the US for "providing material aid to Hamas", by David Abrams, director of pro-Israeli organization, the Zionist Advocacy Center. The case was dismissed in US courts, but Christian Aid had spent £700,000 in defending itself, and said it was an act of "lawfare" against organizations that help Palestinians. A pro-Israeli group, Shurat HaDin , acting on information from

234-481: A complaint of its own, the court dismissed the case and awarded attorney fees to Lynch. Shurat HaDin said that "the case was thrown out on a technicality , not on the merits of the arguments ... [Lynch's] lawyers came up with a trick to avoid the issue being heard on its merits." Shurat HaDin's spokesperson said the suit was a warning to other Australian academic institutions. In June 2014 the General Assembly of

312-570: A group of Israeli-American Jews owning properties in the West Bank. In April 2019 Airbnb reversed its decision and would continue to allow listings from illegal Israeli settlements. In two interviews on The Real News Network , Michael Ratner , president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights , argued that Shurat HaDin

390-661: A lawsuit demanding NIS 15,000 to each of three teenagers (about $ 13,000 ), Shoshana Steinbach, Ayelet Wertzel and Ahuva Frogel, against the New Zealand Palestinian solidarity activists Justine Sachs and Nadia Abu-Shanab for allegedly convincing the New Zealand singer Lorde to cancel her scheduled tour of Tel Aviv in mid-2018. The lawsuit alleged that the cancellation had damaged the teenagers "artistic welfare" and that they had suffered "emotional" injury and "above all damage to their good name as Israelis and Jews." The lawsuit

468-447: A legal case or establish a precedent. The idea, he argues, is to force companies or institutions that Shurat Hadin thinks are acting in ways hostile to Israel's interests to spend enormous sums defending their position. Liz Jackson, staff attorney at Palestine Legal , argues along the same lines. In her view, Shurat HaDin files lawsuits it knows it will lose because the publicity allows it to smear human rights activists as terrorists. It

546-518: A legal system is "an operating set of legal institutions, procedures, and rules". Depending on the definition, a legal system may contain only the set of laws or legal norms issuing from a particular sovereign authority or bound by a shared underlying norm or set of rules, or it may also include for example the institutions and processes by which those laws or legal norms are interpreted and given effect. The 19th-century legal positivist John Austin distinguished legal systems from one another based on

624-462: A mixed system. The distinction between civil law and common law legal systems has become less useful over time as the two groups have become more similar to one other, and also less cohesive as some members of each group have become more different from others. Some analysts also consider socialist legal systems to constitute a separate group. The Nordic legal tradition , encompassing the legal systems of Scandinavia and Iceland, may also be considered

702-804: A political theorist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem , applied for fellowship at Sydney University and asked Jake Lynch at Sydney to endorse his application. Lynch refused, citing his leadership with the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, his support for the BDS movement , the fact that the Hebrew University has a campus in the West Bank and ties to the Israeli military. In 2013 Shurat HaDin sued Lynch for violating Australia's anti-racism laws and attempted to use

780-474: A separate group of legal systems. However, both of these are more commonly considered subgroups of the civil law tradition. Prior to the late 20th century, mixed legal systems were rarely taken into account in classifications of legal systems, but today they are recognized as the most common case: a 2000 study of world legal systems found 92 mixed legal systems, 91 civil law systems, and 42 common law systems. Classifications of legal systems have often reflected

858-510: A superior military power. In this sense, lawfare may be a more humane substitute for military conflict, although Dunlap considers lawfare a "cynical manipulation of the rule of law and the humanitarian values it represents". Benjamin Wittes , Robert Chesney , and Jack Goldsmith employ the word in the name of the Lawfare website, which focuses on national security law and has explored the debate over

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936-485: A tactic used by repressive regimes to label and discourage civil society or individuals from claiming their legal rights via national or international legal systems. This is especially common in situations when individuals and civil society use nonviolent methods to highlight or oppose discrimination , persecution , corruption , lack of democracy , limiting freedom of speech , violations of human rights and violations of international humanitarian law . The term

1014-527: A wall in Saddam Hussein 's palace. A Federal Reserve investigation of the currency determined that UBS was responsible for illegally transferring between $ 4 and $ 5 billion to states designated by the U.S. as sponsors of terrorism between 1996 and 2004. At first UBS sought to deny the extent of the money transfers it had provided to Iran and others, but eventually was compelled to admit the scope of its criminal activities. UBS, one of world's wealthiest banks,

1092-576: Is a portmanteau of the words "law" and "warfare". Perhaps the first use of the term "lawfare" was in the 1975 manuscript Whither Goeth the Law , which argues that the Western legal system has become overly rational and treats persons like objects as compared to so-called "Community Law", which is based more on humanity and intuition. As an example of the use of such an approach, the Confucian Code of Propriety (Li)

1170-465: Is a book about Israel — and this lawsuit is simply a new front in the never-ending war against anyone who has the temerity to criticize Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. The goal of the lawsuit isn't to force Simon & Schuster to pay damages for publishing Carter's book; its goal is to bully Carter and other would-be critics of Israel into not writing books like Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid in

1248-441: Is also sometimes classified as a legal system, but this classification is disputed. Legal systems vary in their sources of law and the extent to which they are based on formal written law; some civil law systems have been based exclusively on statutory law while some customary law systems are based entirely on oral tradition. Legal systems are classified in many different ways. One popular classification divides them into

1326-510: Is an Israeli non-governmental organization (NGO) founded in Tel Aviv in 2003. Shurat HaDin has been described as a civil rights organization. However, it has also been accused of pro-Israel lawfare . When Shurat Hadin was founded in 2003, its stated purpose was to "combat terrorism and promote civil rights through research , education and litigation ." According to its founder and president, Nitsana Darshan-Leitner , its creation

1404-408: Is defined by a shared rule of recognition under which a pronouncement is recognized as valid law. These positivist accounts of the legal system have been challenged from various perspectives. Twentieth-century scholarship on legal pluralism emphasized that many legal norms do not arise from an identifiable government or sovereign, and therefore legal systems could not be defined simply based on

1482-557: Is frequently cited example of lawfare by the Chinese government. In particular, China has asserted sovereign control over several areas in the South China Sea , and has restricted access to areas within its alleged sovereign territory or exclusive economic zone . In support of its claims, China has issued official state declarations (e.g., notes verbal ) and enacted domestic laws that assert its sovereignty or effective control of portions of

1560-608: Is mentioned, which was used in China and Korea in the past. A more frequently cited use of the term is found in a 2001 essay authored by Major General Charles J. Dunlap Jr. , in which Dunlap defines lawfare as "the use of law as a weapon of war"; that is, "a method of warfare where law is used as a means of realizing a military objective". He later expanded on the definition, describing lawfare as "the exploitation of real, perceived, or even orchestrated incidents of law-of-war violations being employed as an unconventional means of confronting"

1638-437: Is not used in the source legal system but is spoken in multiple other legal systems (for example, a German legal document into French) must decide which legal system's legal language and conceptual framework to use in the translation. The classification of legal systems is also of practical importance in legal translation because it governs the difficulty of the translator's task: the more closely related two legal systems are,

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1716-427: Is often used to refer specifically to the laws of a particular nation state . Some countries have a single legal system, while others may have multiple overlapping legal systems arising from distinct sources of sovereign authority, as is often the case in federal states . In addition, different groups within a country are sometimes subject to different legal systems; this is known as legal pluralism . International law

1794-815: Is one of three components of the People's Liberation Army (PLA)'s three warfares doctrine, which was approved by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party and the Central Military Commission in December 2003 to guide PLA political warfare and information influence operations . The activities of the People's Republic of China in relation to the territorial disputes in the South China Sea

1872-407: The BDS movement . Consequently, Shurat HaDin and David Abrams of the Zionist Advocacy Center filed an unfair labor practices against the union. Shurat HaDin argued that it violated "American labor law for the union to encourage its members to cease doing business with Israelis and Israeli companies." The National Labor Relations Board dismissed the complaint. Shurat HaDin is preparing to take

1950-483: The Gaza Flotilla . In 2011 Shurat HaDin, representing five plaintiffs, sued former President Jimmy Carter and publisher Simon & Schuster over the publication of Carter's book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid . It claimed that Carter and his publisher engaged in "deceptive acts in the course of conducting business" and Darshan-Leitner claimed that Carter's "hatred of Israel has led him to commit this fraud on

2028-730: The Jewish Agency , attempted to escape the country to Israel. In 2006 Shurat HaDin sued former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami on behalf of their families as they thought they had been wrongfully imprisoned when he was president. However, in 2014 it was found that the majority of the Jews had been killed by Iranian security forces who believed them to be members of the dissident group People's Mujahedin of Iran . The others had been killed by members of their local tribe for unspecified reasons. In 2008, Shurat HaDin and Attorney Robert Tolchin of New York filed suit against American Express Bank (Amex) in

2106-700: The New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan accusing the bank of facilitating transfer of money to Hezbollah . Representing some 85 victims and their family members, the Shurat HaDin lawsuit alleged that the Amex and the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB) illegally transferred millions of dollars in wire transfers to Hezbollah between 2004 and 2006. In May 2008, Shurat HaDin was co-counsel in filing in

2184-785: The Palestinian Authority (PA) to the International Criminal Court (ICC). In the event that the Palestinian Authority is accepted into the ICC, it will enable the PA to become susceptible to lawsuits. Shurat HaDin is preparing in advance by collecting thousands of testimonies from Israeli victims of Palestinian attacks. In 2015, Shurat HaDin represented plaintiffs who were victims of political violence in Israel committed by Hamas and

2262-734: The Presbyterian Church (USA) passed a resolution calling for divestment from U.S. companies with business interests in Israel. Altogether approximately $ 21 million worth of shares was divested from Hewlett Packard, Caterpillar and Motorola Solutions. Consequently, Shurat HaDin filed a complaint with the IRS arguing that PCUSA's tax-exempt status should be revoked. Shurat HaDin also claimed that it had evidence of PCUSA delegates meeting with Hezbollah and distributing anti-Semitic and anti-Israel materials. In 2015 Shurat HaDin called on Coca-Cola to drop its Palestinian franchise because its head, Zahi Khouri ,

2340-797: The USSR . David also acknowledged, but gave lesser importance to, the Islamic, Hindu , and traditional Chinese legal traditions. David's classification remained highly influential for several decades. However, in the late 20th century it came under attack for being excessively scientistic and nationalistic . In 1973, German comparatists Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz proposed a similar classification that recognized "Romanist" (typified by France), "Germanic", Anglo-American, Scandinavian, Socialist, Hindu, Islamic, and "Far Eastern" groups of legal systems, which were all distinguished from one another on stylistic grounds. Until

2418-695: The United States District Court for the Southern District of New York against the Swiss bank, UBS which was accused of financing terror. The group alleges that UBS was involved in transferring dollars to regimes such as Iran, Cuba , and North Korea . The UBS operation was uncovered by American soldiers in Iraq in 2003 who discovered brand new dollars, still wrapped in Federal Reserve casings behind

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2496-489: The World Justice Project ranks national legal systems annually by their adherence to the rule of law . A distinguishing feature of legal translation compared to other forms of translation is that it often involves translating not only between languages but also between legal systems. A translator tasked, for example, with translating a legal document from one language and legal system into another language that

2574-557: The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade . Shurat HaDin sued the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and Palestinian Authority (PA) in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York under the U.S. Anti-Terrorism Act , arguing that the PLO and PA had facilitated the attacks by providing financial aid and logistical support to the attackers, and by providing stipends to the families of suicide bombers . The jury awarded

2652-403: The civil law tradition , common law tradition , religious law systems, customary law systems, and mixed legal systems . Modern scholarship, however, has moved away from these fixed categories toward an understanding of legal systems as drawing from multiple legal traditions or patterns. Legal systems have been defined in various ways. In one influential definition by John Henry Merryman ,

2730-498: The sovereign from which the laws flowed. A similar analysis had been proposed some centuries earlier by Francisco de Vitoria . Under Austin's analysis, any law that is part of a legal system must have been enacted by the same sovereign legislator. The 20th-century Austrian scholar Hans Kelsen took a different approach, in which all legal norms in a legal system must arise from a single underlying basic norm . The English theorist H.L.A. Hart argued instead that each legal system

2808-455: The 1990s, these classifications of legal systems into family groups were typically considered rigid and fixed over time. But through the scholarship of H. Patrick Glenn this metaphor of static legal families has been supplanted by the concept of legal traditions, in which hybrid or mixed systems are the norm rather than the exception. In 1997, Ugo Mattei proposed classifying legal systems according to their social constraints, and particularly

2886-515: The American scholar John Henry Wigmore proposed a five-part classification of legal systems: primitive, ancient, Euro-American, religious, and "Afro-Asian". Wigmore's approach, the first to elevate the United States to top-level significance and the first to take Indigenous legal systems into account, was also noteworthy for erasing the distinctions among the different European legal traditions. In

2964-511: The BDS movement is criminalized. The NATO Strategic Communications Centre of Excellence has cited the alleged use of human shields by groups like Hamas as an example of lawfare, hinging on exploiting Israeli claims that they minimize civilian casualties , as well as the sensitivity of Western public opinion. This tactic allows Hamas to either accuse Israel of war crimes if civilian casualties occur or to protect its assets and continue operations if

3042-573: The IDF limits its military response. According to Canadian lawmaker and former minister Irwin Cotler , the use of law to delegitimize Israel is present in five areas: United Nations , international law , humanitarian law , the struggle against racism and the struggle against genocide . The government of the People's Republic of China has explicitly recognized lawfare (" falu zhan " or "legal warfare") as an essential component of its strategic doctrine. Lawfare

3120-541: The Israeli government and the Israeli intelligence community. According to a leaked U.S. diplomatic cable , Darshan-Leitner told U.S. officials in 2007 that "in its early years" Shurat HaDin "took direction from the GOI [Government of Israel] on which cases to pursue" and that it received evidence from Israeli government officials. The cable quoted Darshan-Leitner directly: "The [Israeli] National Security Council (NSC) legal office saw

3198-501: The Israeli government's policies of oppression, ethnic cleansing, human rights violations, occupation and apartheid. As part of this struggle, we believe that an economic, intellectual and artistic boycott is an effective way of speaking out against these crimes. This worked very effectively against apartheid in South Africa, and we hope it can work again. We can play an important role in challenging injustice today. We urge you to act in

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3276-586: The Israeli government, is believed to have used lawfare to prevent a Gaza-bound flotilla from leaving Greece. Many cases have been brought forward against Israeli officials and those associated with the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), accusing them of war crimes . These cases have been heard in Israel and other countries. Attempts to suppress the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement have also been called lawfare. In Israel and many US states, supporting

3354-595: The State of New York in October 2015; the plaintiffs alleged that Facebook had ignored incitement to violence by Palestinian users. The suit was dismissed under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act . Nitsana Darshan-Leitner argued that by allowing Hamas , Hezbollah , PLO , and ISIS to use Facebook the social media giant is providing "material support" to those groups. In January 2018, Shurat HaDin filed

3432-447: The abduction. In 2015 the court ordered North Korea to pay $ 300 million in punitive damages and $ 15 million each to Kim's brother and his son. According to Darshan-Leitner, this was the first time a US court has found that a foreign regime which abducts an individual who is then never heard from again, has the burden of proving that he has not been murdered. Shurat Hadin used lawfare to threaten lawsuits against parties associated with

3510-643: The allegations were unfounded. An investigation conducted by AusAID in conjunction with the Australian Federal Police and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation , found no evidence to substantiate Shurat HaDin's claims of a link between UAWC and PFLP. In an October 2012 letter to Shurat ha-Din, World Vision Australia CEO Tim Costello said that the allegations made by Shurat HaDin were "unsubstantiated, and in some circumstances, defamatory". In 2012 Dan Avnon,

3588-405: The arcane intricacies of feudal law to continuously undermine Plantagenet (English) authority over their continental territories, 'clogging up administrative processes', 'interfering with fiscal activities' and burying English officials under a deluge of legal cases. Both pro-Israeli groups and pro-Palestinian groups have been accused of using lawfare against one another. In 2017 Christian Aid ,

3666-525: The classifier's view of geopolitical power relations. In 1909, Adhémar Esmein proposed classifying legal systems into Roman, Germanic, Anglo-Saxon, Slavic, and Islamic groups, which corresponded to the five major global empires of the time. This classification ignored, among others, the legal systems of Africa, China, and Japan, which Esmein did not consider significant. In 1913, Georges Sauser-Hall proposed an explicitly racial classification of legal systems into Indo-European, Semitic, and Mongolian. In 1928,

3744-415: The definition of lawfare and whether it should be considered exclusively a pejorative. Adversarial uses of legal systems by non-state actors has also been identified under the similar classification of paper terrorism , based on an analogous comparison to conventional armed terrorism . Lawfare may involve the law of a nation turned against its own officials, but more recently it has been associated with

3822-484: The degree to which they adhered to three patterns: "rule of professional law", "rule of political law", and "rule of traditional law", from which all legal systems drew to some extent. The paradigmatic examples of these three patterns were the United States, Cuba, and Saudi Arabia, respectively. In contrast to these historic and stylistic classifications, some organizations have developed classifications and rankings of legal systems based on particular metrics. For example,

3900-431: The expansion of international human rights and universal jurisdiction, states in his book The Terror Presidency that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was concerned with the possibility of lawfare waged against Bush administration officials, and that Rumsfeld "could expect to be on top of the list". Rumsfeld addresses the effects of lawfare in his memoir Known and Unknown . Legal system The term "legal system"

3978-645: The family a $ 323 million judgement. In 2012 Shurat HaDin sent a letter to the Christian relief, development, and advocacy group World Vision Australia (WV) and the Australian government's international aid agency AusAID , asserting that the groups' funding of the Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC), a Gaza -based Palestinian nonprofit group, could make WV and AusAID "personally, criminally and civilly liable under Australian and US law." Shurat HaDin alleged that UAWC

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4056-465: The first place. The plaintiffs dropped the suit after a few months. In 2006 Daniel Wultz , a 16-year-old American, was killed in a suicide attack in a Tel Aviv restaurant . Islamic Jihad , based in Damascus , Syria, took responsibility. Shurat HaDin brought a lawsuit on behalf of the family against Syria and Iran which it argued were responsible. In 2012 the court sided with the plaintiff and awarded

4134-438: The intelligence agency. She wrote that Mossad operatives held regular briefings with her and would tip her off on suspect financing for her to file lawsuits against. In some cases, the Israeli government provided written affidavits to back up claims. She claimed that her role in the operation was voluntary and unpaid. Two of the cases she credited the cooperation for was the lawsuit against the Palestinian Authority in 2015 and

4212-474: The lawsuit was an attempt to chill free speech and that attempts to enforce the judgement were unlikely to be successful. In November 2018 Airbnb announced that it would remove listings of properties owned by settlers in the Israeli-occupied West Bank . Israel's Strategic Affairs Minister Gilad Erdan called on affected settlers to sue Airbnb. Shurat HaDin consequently sued Airbnb on behalf of

4290-453: The legal complaints that led to the disbanding of a planned 2011 Gaza flotilla. Israel's military censors had to redact a fifth of the text according to Darshan-Leitner. Critics have labeled Shurat HaDin a " government-organized non-governmental organization " over its ties to the Israeli government. Shurat HaDin has filed a large number of lawsuits and legal complaints. In 1994, twelve Iranian Jews disappeared as they, aided by Mossad and

4368-510: The momentary state of the "legal system", while others including Andrzej Grabowski use "legal system" in the opposite sense, to refer to the momentary state of the "legal order". Various different taxonomies of legal systems have been proposed, for example into families or traditions on historic and stylistic grounds. One common division is between the civil law tradition and the common law tradition , which covers most modern countries that are not governed by customary law or Islamic law or

4446-584: The more straightforward the translation process is. The difficulties in translating between common and civil law legal systems is particularly well-known. Thus for example, even though Finnish and Swedish are unrelated languages, the similarities between the Finnish and Swedish legal systems makes the translation process more straightforward than translating a legal document between dissimilar systems. Shurat HaDin Shurat HaDin , also Israel Law Center ( ILC ),

4524-414: The national legal systems were subordinate parts. H.L.A. Hart considered international law to be law, but not a legal system, because it lacked a rule of recognition, rule of change, or rule of adjudication. However, it is increasingly considered to be a legal system. The origin of this view of international law is credited to the 18th-century German legal theorist Georg Friedrich von Martens . Although

4602-576: The organizations include $ 1.1 million from U.S. foundations and charities over the last decade. Prominent donors are the John Hagee Ministries, run by Christian Zionist John Hagee , which has donated at least $ 225,000; the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston, which has given $ 475,000; and the Michael and Andrea Leven Family Foundation, which has given $ 25,000. Shurat HaDin works closely with

4680-425: The other anti- Palestinian Arab in an effort to establish bias at Facebook; Facebook at first removed only the anti-Arab hate page, while maintaining that the overtly anti-Semitic anti-Israel page "met community standards", but later conceded that the pages were alike and also removed the anti-Israel hate page. The same year a class-action lawsuit, Lakin v. Facebook Inc. , was filed on behalf of 20,000 Israelis in

4758-687: The plaintiffs $ 218.5 million, which was automatically trebled under the Anti-Terrorism Act to $ 655.5 million. In 2016, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit overturned the verdict, finding that PLO and PA lacked a sufficient connection to the United States for the federal courts to exercise jurisdiction over them in a civil case, in accordance with the limits set by the Constitution's Due Process Clause . In December 2015, Shurat HaDin posted two racist Facebook pages, one anti-Israel and

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4836-478: The postwar period, the influential French comparatist René David classified the world's legal systems into four broad groups: Romano-Germanic, common law, socialist law, and "other conceptions of law and the social order". This classification represented a French Cold War worldview, with the Romano-Germanic legal systems epitomized by France, common law systems by the United States, and socialist law systems by

4914-483: The public." Shurat HaDin sought $ 5 million in damages. Simon & Schuster said the suit was frivolous, without merit, and a "chilling attack on free speech." Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School said it was "clearly frivolous" and that the complaint was "written like a press release without a thin pretense of legal claims." Kevin Jon Heller of Australian National University argued that it

4992-719: The sea. China's attempts at framing cross-strait relations with Taiwan as an internal dispute is also cited as an example of lawfare. Academic Hung Chin-fu of National Cheng Kung University has described Chinese legislation to prevent Taiwan from culturally asserting its own identity as a form of lawfare. China's 2013 creation of its Air Defense Identification Zone that cover the disputed Senkaku Islands has also been cited as lawfare. The government of China has also used lawsuits in foreign courts to repress Chinese dissidents abroad, which has also been labeled as lawfare by academic Diego A. Zambrano of Stanford Law School . Harvard School of Law professor Jack Goldsmith , an opponent to

5070-461: The sovereign. H. Patrick Glenn argued that legal systems were a structurally inadequate way of thinking about law because they failed to capture the epistemic and ill-defined nature of law, arguing for legal traditions as a better unit of analysis. Scholarly opinions on whether international law is a legal system have varied. Kelsen viewed international law as either included in all national legal systems, or an overarching legal system of which

5148-515: The spirit of progressive New Zealanders who came before you and continue their legacy. In October 2018, the Jerusalem Magistrate's Court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered that the two New Zealand activists pay NIS 45,000 in damages to the plaintiffs, plus NIS 11,000 in legal fees (about $ 23,600 ). This is believed to be the first successful application of the 2011 law. The two activists stated that they had "no intention" of paying

5226-553: The spread of universal jurisdiction , that is, one nation or an international organization hosted by that nation reaching out to seize and prosecute officials of another. French officials deployed a form of lawfare in the lead-up to the Hundred Years' War , according to historians Iskander Rehman and David Green. Rehman states: In the fraught decades leading up the Hundred Years War, French officials deployed their expertise in

5304-484: The suit to outlaw BDS in Australia. The Executive Council of Australian Jewry publicly denounced the suit as an inappropriate use of the courts. In April 2014 the court struck part of the suit, and Shurat HaDin lawyers narrowed the complaint to the specifics of Avnon and Lynch. But Avnon made known that he did not support the suit. In July 2014, noting that Shurat HaDin did not represent a willing client and did not have

5382-480: The teenagers, and launched a crowdfunding campaign in order to give the money to the Gaza Mental Health Foundation, and raised more than $ 18,000 in three days. Darshan-Leitner said that legal agreements between Israel and New Zealand allowed her to enforce the ruling in New Zealand, and to "go after [the activists'] bank accounts until it has been fully realized." Legal experts in New Zealand said that

5460-399: The terms "legal order" and "legal system" are commonly used interchangeably, some writers have distinguished them. A number of legal positivists have used one term to refer to the set of legal norms in effect in a territory at a particular moment, and the other to refer to the set of legal norms over time. Theorists such as Eugenio Bulygin and Carlos Alchourrón use "legal order" to refer to

5538-442: The use of civil courts as a way to do things that they are not authorized to do." She later denied ever saying that to a U.S. diplomat. In an interview in 2014, Darshan-Leitner told a Swedish pro-Israel nonprofit that "governments cannot do what we do", citing "political restraints" and "international treaties". In a 2017 book entitled Harpoon after Mossad 's finance-tracking unit, Darshan-Leitner described her cooperation with

5616-603: Was a front group for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a proscribed terrorist organization, and asserted that by providing aid to the UAWC, WV and AusAID were "aiding and abetting Palestinian terrorism, and thereby violating Australian and United States anti-terrorism laws." WV suspended its work with UAWC pending an outcome of the investigation, and resumed working with UAWC after AusAID and WV determined that

5694-410: Was a Zionist propaganda arm for Israel, dedicated to filing multiple suits without necessarily expecting to win them. Australian academic Stuart Rees has accused Shurat HaDin of acting as a legal attack dog for the Israeli government. Pro-Palestinian blogger Richard Silverstein states that Shurat Hadin files frivolous lawsuits designed to tie up resources and garner headlines, rather than to win

5772-435: Was an attempt to bully Israel's critics: I would hope that both the left and the right could agree that using consumer-protection laws to sue authors and publishers who publish books with controversial theses is a very bad idea. Indeed, in a world full of Glenn Becks and Pat Buchanans, it is revealing that this is the first lawsuit of its kind (a point of pride, scarily enough, for the plaintiffs' lawyers). But, of course, this

5850-413: Was endorsing the BDS movement. It advised Coca-Cola not to associate with any entity advocating for boycotts of Israel. Shurat HaDin warned that legal action could be taken to "ensure that The Coca-Cola Company is not engaged in instituting, promoting or inciting boycotts." In August 2015 United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America became the first national trade union in the U.S. to endorse

5928-590: Was filed under the Israeli Law for Prevention of Damage to State of Israel through Boycott . Sachs and Abu-Shanab had earlier penned an open letter on the New Zealand online current affairs magazine The Spinoff in December 2017 urging Lorde to cancel her Israel concert, citing human rights abuses against the Palestinians. The letter read: Dear Lorde ... we're two young women based in Aotearoa, one Jewish, one Palestinian, ... Today, millions of people stand opposed to

6006-470: Was fined $ 100 million by the Federal Reserve for its conduct. In 2000 Kim Dong-shik , a South Korean pastor, was abducted in northeastern China and has not been heard from since. In 2009 Shurat HaDin, to help Kim's son and brother, both U.S. citizens, brought a lawsuit against North Korea in a U.S. federal court, seeking damages for Kim's torture and murder because the country was suspected to be behind

6084-695: Was inspired by the Southern Poverty Law Center in the United States , which used civil litigation to cripple and bankrupt the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi groups in the US. By 2012, Shurat HaDin had eleven employees. It retains two public relations firms, one in Israel and one in New York. As of 2015, the annual budget was $ 2.5 million, though Shurat HaDin does not disclose its donors. According to an In These Times review in 2019, donations to

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