Karama Visits

“Prisoner Visits” is a project run by Al-Karama Human Rights Center that provides legal visits by lawyers to Palestinian prisoners held inside the Green Line. Its aim is to follow their situation in prison, learn about their conditions of detention and their legal and health needs, and strengthen their ties with their families.

The visits include listening to the prisoners and documenting the violations or hardships they report, giving legal advice, and setting the follow-up steps each case requires. The project also makes it possible to pass information to families, within the limits of the prisoner’s consent and lawyer–client confidentiality, helping them know how their children are doing.

Through the project, the center seeks to ease the financial burden of visits on prisoners and their families, to involve lawyers in human-rights work, and to tie each visit to real follow-up, so that a prisoner’s needs and testimony do not go unanswered.

The visit is a gateway to legal accompaniment: the lawyer listens to the prisoner, gives legal advice, and identifies the issues that need intervention or follow-up with the relevant authorities. The project also helps keep families informed about their children’s situation, with the prisoner’s consent and while keeping information confidential.

The center has set up a fund to support these visits and ease their financial burden on families. Lawyers carry out the visits and follow the cases that arise from them, which deepens their practical experience in defending prisoners’ rights and widens the circle of lawyers engaged in this field.

The project links visits, documentation and legal follow-up by preparing reports that record the information the prisoner provides and set out their needs and the steps required to meet them, in keeping with confidentiality and professional ethics. Depending on each case, demands concerning health care and conditions of detention are pursued, by approaching the relevant authorities or taking appropriate legal action.