There
is no doubt that Olmert was deeply immersed in corruption, like many
in the top echelons of Israeli government today. However, the justice
system in Israel today appears
to operate
as an arm of Netanyahu's efforts to
consolidate
his autocratic rule by a series of targeted prosecutions of his
potential political opponents. High
profile
corruption cases are
litigated out
of
compliance with the fundamentals of due process...
Figure : Former PM Ehud Olmert and his former personal secretary/confidant Shula Zaken (turned prosecution witness under a plea bargain deal), on the background of the monstrous Holyland project in Jerusalem , built outside normal zoning codes, and where bribes were paid to Olmert by developers.
_____
OccupytTLV, February 16 - Request to Inspect former PM Ehud Olmert's Arrest Warrant was filed by this writer earlier this week in the Jerusalem Magistrate Court. [1] The Arrest Warrant, public judicial record by Israeli law, fails to appear in the case docket...
Israeli law, like the law in civil societies, prohibits the imprisonment of any person without a "lawfully made arrest warrant". Warrantless imprisonment is a fundamental violation of Civil and Human Rights. Without recorded arrest warrants, human dignity and liberty are under permanent threat. However, it is obvious that the authorities in Israel do not comply with Israeli law in this matter in recent years. Current conditions in this regard in Israel fit a dictatorship.
Therefore, the filing of the Request to Inspect of former PM Ehud Olmert 's Arrest Warrant was only meant to demonstrate the absurd: Even a former PM is imprisoned with no arrest warrant...
Israeli and international media widely covered former PM Olmert imprisonment on Monday. [2] The Guardian UK, for example, stated in its headline that Olmert " begins 19-month prison sentence".
However, that is fact is not clear at all...
The
imprisonment
followed
a dramatic ruling by
Presiding Judge Avital Chen of the Jerusalem Magistrate Court on
February 10, which was also widely covered by media. However, Judge
Chen's ruling also failed to appear in the court
file docket
for a couple of days, and appeared only after its absence from the
docket was widely publicized by this author...
And
today,
Yediot daily reports
that the Judge
Chen's February 10, 2016 Judgment record pertaining to Olmert's
imprisonment
is unclear. Due
to
ambiguity in Judge Avital Chen's
Judgment
it
remains unclear, what Olmert's prison term is.
[3]
Therefore,
it turns out that the Request to Inspect Olmert's Arrest Warrant was
fully justified...
The ambiguity regarding Olmert's prison term is related to the overlapping prison sentences in a couple of cases, where former PM Olmert was convicted. The bulk of the prison term is related to his conviction in the Holyland corruption trial in the Tel-Aviv District Court. However, in that case too, following intensive efforts for over a year, requests to inspect the Tel-Aviv District Court file and the Supreme Court file (where an appeal was conducted for over a year) -- the authentic judgment record is nowhere to be found... [4]
Such circumstances stand contrary to Israeli law, which provides that judicial decision and judgment records are public records, which "any person may inspect" (but not motion and response records, in contrast with US and state laws). Moreover, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel conducted a 12 year long petition on the right to inspect judicial records. In its 2009 judgment in the petition, the Israeli Supreme Court declares that the right to inspect judicial records is "a fundamental principle in any democratic regime", and "a constitutional, supra-statutory right". Albeit, there is no constitution in Israel...
Moreover, concomitantly with such highfalutin declarations, the Israeli courts implemented over the past decade fraudulent computerized case management systems in the courts, which permit false docketing in court cases, the publication of sham/simulated judicial records, and more. Based on submission, authored by this writer, the UN Human Rights Council Periodic Review of Israeli (2013) noted in its Professional Staff Report (page 4, p 25) "lack of integrity of the electronic record systems of the Supreme Court, District Court and Detainees' Courts in Israel". [5] With it, the profound corruption of the Israeli justice system over the past decade should be considered equivalent to unannounced regime change, stripping the fundamental protection of rights, still provided in the written law. [6]
There is no doubt that Olmert was deeply immersed in corruption, like many in the top echelons of Israeli government today. However, the justice system in Israel today appears to operate as an arm of Netanyahu's efforts to consolidate his autocratic rule by a series of targeted prosecutions of his potential political opponents. High profile corruption cases are litigated out of compliance with the fundamentals of due process... The warrantless imprisonment of former PM Ehud Olmert is only the latest reminder of the nature of the Israeli regime today...
LINKS
[1]
2016-02-14 State
of Israel v Ehud Olmert
(38168-01-16) in the Jerusalem Magistrate Court -- Request (#2) to
inspect transcripts ,
arrest warrant [bi-lingual
Hebrew-English filing]
https://www.scribd.com/doc/299222225/
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