Photo by Tal DahanAppeal to District Court seeks to end the municipality’s unauthorized insistence on a prior permit; petitioners call burdensome bureaucratic requirements “a severe blow to freedom of expression.”
The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) and five social justice activists filed a petition in the Tel Aviv District Court today (3 July 2012) against the Tel Aviv Municipality. The petition demands that the municipality cease its policy of requiring those who erect protest tents in the city to seek prior approval from the municipality.
The petitioners argue that while the municipality is authorized to clear out a tent if it causes nuisance or constitutes a hazard, it is not authorized to dismantle a tent just because the tent was erected without a permit. According to the petitioners, the municipality’s policy constitutes a severe blow to the freedom of expression and reflects an unacceptably presumptuous attempt to control the manifestation of the protests.
The petition details the trials of one of the petitioners, the activist Tamir Hajaj, who sought to erect a protest tent in Rabin Square in Tel Aviv. After the tent he pitched was dismantled by city inspectors on the grounds that it was not licensed, Hajaj tried to obtain a permit to re-erect the tent. He was transferred from one office to another, until finally being asked to submit an application detailing the objective of the tent, its size and location, and how long he planned for it to stand. After he furnished these details, he was required to apply for a business license, a police permit, and a fire department permit. In order to obtain the police permit, he needed approval from a safety engineer, an electrician, and Magen David Adom, and a commitment to place a security guard on the premises. The fire department permit required proof that the tent met the requirements of the Standards Institution of Israel.
Aside from all these requirements, the municipality permitted the tent for only 9 days (and not the 45 requested) and forbade sleeping in the tent or including a sitting area.
ACRI Attorney Sharona Eliahu-Chai filed the petition. “The Tel Aviv municipality is burdening the demonstrators with unnecessary bureaucracy, without legal authority, the practical meaning of which is a severe blow to freedom of expression. There is a big difference between the regulation of a potential hazard and the unending harassment of those who wish to express themselves through legal protest. If this policy had been in effect last summer, the social protest would not have been possible,” Elihau-Chai said.
According to ACRI Attorney Avner Pinchuk, “at ACRI we are familiar with different incidents in which inspectors have removed protest tents when the tents included criticism of local government leaders. There are already attempts to silence local protests that are uncomfortable for municipal leaders. If the court sanctions this illegal policy of destruction of tents just because they were erected without prior permission from the city, it will be a death blow to a protest of any sort. The small citizen cannot acquire expensive advertising space and cannot always cope with the municipal bureaucracy. A tent, a sign, a protest – these are basic rights in a democratic country.”
