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Sunday, October 30, 2005
Mazuz accused of 'unfair' arrest policy

Mazuz accused of 'unfair' arrest policy
Dan Izenberg, THE JERUSALEM POST Oct. 30, 2005
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1129540627584&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

[IMRA: It went far beyond "But they infuriated Courts Administration head
Boaz Okun, who demanded that the Public Defender, Inbal Rubinstein, issue a
public apology for the letter." - judges were pressing for Rubinstein to be
fired]

Orit Struck, head of the Organization for Human Rights in Judea and Samaria,
on Saturday blasted Attorney-General Menahem Mazuz for allegedly
spearheading the government's harsh arrest policy against disengagement
opponents that was allegedly adopted by the Supreme Court.

Struck's comments came following the publication late last week of an
internal document drafted by the Public Defender's Office which charged that
the courts collaborated with the government by unfairly treating opponents
of disengagement to facilitate implementation of the government's plan.

The document charged that "the judicial handling of the disengagement
detainees strengthens the feeling that the need to deter the plan's
opponents and to foil anyone who tried to interfere with it so as to enable
[the government] to continue implementing it took precedence over basic
rules that must be observed in order to conduct proper criminal procedures."

The Public Defender's Office also wrote that "this expressed itself on
several levels and begins with the fact that the investigative and arresting
authorities adopted a 'trigger happy' policy. This policy won the
cooperation of the courts. In the conduct of the state prosecution and in
the court procedures, there is an obvious deviation towards the severe
compared with the arrest policy conducted in normal times."

Responding to a media report which said Mazuz would study the "internal
report," Struck said that the examination should be conducted by an external
body since Mazuz himself was responsible for the policy criticized in the
report.

Justice Ministry spokesman Ya'acov Galanti told The Jerusalem Post that the
Public Defender's Office document was nothing more than an internal letter
which had not yet been discussed by the senior ministry echelon. Galanti
said that the report alleging that Mazuz intended to study the report was
incorrect and that in fact the report would be discussed and considered like
any other internal document before the ministry's official position on the
matter was formulated.

Two weeks earlier, reports in several newspapers carried partial accounts of
the Public Defender's Office letter. The reports did not mention the
criticism of Mazuz, focusing only on the criticism of the court's allegedly
unfair treatment of minors arrested during disengagement protests. At the
time, the Justice Ministry refused to comment on the reports. But they
infuriated Courts Administration head Boaz Okun, who demanded that the
Public Defender, Inbal Rubinstein, issue a public apology for the letter.

On Thursday, Rubinstein did so, distributing a letter to the staff of the
Public Defender's Office in which she wrote that "given the fact that the
letter was an internal document and [only] a draft, it contained
formulations that were general and sweeping. I would like to make it clear
that the criticism was aimed at various judicial decisions referred to in
the document and that there was no intention of accusing the judges as a
whole or the juvenile court judges in particular."

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