The military prosecution has ordered a Palestinian rearrested on what appears to be the same charge as one of which he was already acquitted by the Military Court of Appeals, barring the detainee from seeing the evidence.

The Palestinian’s attorney, Labib Habib, says this decision constitutes contempt of court and violates the principle of double jeopardy. But the prosecution insists the earlier court case “has no relevance” to Mohammed Sadqa’s current arrest.

On April 29, the Military Court of Appeals overturned a lower court ruling that had convicted Sadqa, 40, on charges of arms dealing. The appellate court said there were serious flaws in the investigation and major contradictions between the three different versions of events given by the prosecution’s only witness. Moreover, it said, the lower court never explained its rationale for convicting Sadqa. All this created grounds for reasonable doubt about his guilt, it concluded.

Immediately after the appellate court issued its ruling, the prosecutor, Capt. Asher Silber, announced that it was possible to issue an administrative detention order against Sadqa on the spot. No such order was actually issued, and Sadqa was released after four years in jail. But the very fact that Silber could make such a statement, argued Habib, clearly demonstrates the prosecution’s intent: to circumvent Sadqa’s acquittal, and its own failure to prove the charges against him, by seeking an alternative method of keeping him in jail.

And in fact, the military prosecution did subsequently pursue an alternative means of returning him to prison – by applying to the military parole board. In 2002, at the height of the second intifada, Sadqa had been arrested, convicted and sentenced to 14 years in jail for military activity against Israel within Fatah ranks. But in August 2008, as a part of an Israeli gesture to the Palestinian Authority, he and 197 other Palestinian prisoners were granted commutations and released from jail. Under the terms of his commutation, however, he could be returned to jail to serve out the rest of his sentence if he committed another crime carrying a possible sentence of three months or more. And unlike a court hearing in an ordinary criminal case, the parole board can approve such a step on the basis of classified information that neither the defendant nor his lawyer is entitled to see, and therefore cannot disprove.

In Sadqa’s case, when he was first rearrested in 2010, the military prosecution decided against asking the military parole board to return him to jail, instead filing a new indictment against him for arms dealing. But after the appellate court overturned his conviction, the prosecution decided to go the parole board route instead. In August, therefore, it had Sadqa rearrested and asked the parole board to approve his return to jail on the basis of the same evidence that the appellate court had found insufficient in the arms-dealing case, plus some additional classified evidence.

The prosecution argues that in an administrative procedure such as the one before the parole board, the burden of proof is lower than it is in a criminal case, and therefore the evidence that the appellate court rejected ought to be accepted by the parole board. For the same reason, it doesn’t see this move as constituting contempt of court.

But Habib disagrees, arguing the prosecution has no right to circumvent the court’s ruling by going to the parole board, and is therefore seeking his client’s release.

An army spokesperson commented that “any attempt to connect the application to reverse the reduction in penalty and the suit for damages due to his acquittal is baseless.”