Lila Margalit has been working intensively since 2002 to defend the rights of Israel’s prison population through landmark litigation and tenacious legal advocacy. By so doing she has helped to give a voice to one of Israel’s most isolated sectors. In the following interview she reflects on the most poignant aspects of her work over the last four years, and considers newly identified issues that ACRI is currently working on.
Question: The decision to construct Israel’s first prison is a radical one. What in particular concerns you?
I think what mainly concerns us is that when you take an authority like the power to hold people behind bars, with its inherent potential for human rights violations, and hand it over to an organization whose primary motivation is financial gain, you are effectively taking one of the state’s most fundamental roles and entrusting it to a private body who does not necessarily have the public’s, or the prisoners`, interest at heart. One of our main concerns, for example, is that the quality of the personnel may be drastically reduced because in order for the prison to be profitable, the prison’s ongoing expenses have to be cut and one of the first places we have seen in the world where expenses are cut, are staff salaries. This leads to a lower quality of personnel and a higher turnover, and to a situation where instead of having the same people running the prison over a long period of time who develop a certain level of expertise, you have a constant flow of new and inexperienced personnel. We are also concerned that other basic services that are provided for the prisoners will be minimal and will not reflect their real needs. Ultimately the concern is that once a private prison is up and running the state won’t be able to effectively supervise its management, and even if theoretically the state has various steps at its disposal to act against mismanagement or rights’ violations, it is doubtful that these steps will be put into effect.
Question: How has the modern “media era” affected the rights of prisoners and detainees, like the right to privacy?
A few years ago one of ACRI’s landmark criminal justice cases established the right to free speech for prisoners, and the right of a prisoner to publish articles in the media. Unfortunately, ACRI is currently handling the case of a prisoner who is trying to publish a number of articles and was being prevented from doing so by prison authorities who placed one obstacle after another in his path, despite the prison service’s obligation to allow him to do so. Only through ACRI’s intervention on his behalf has he finally been allowed to send a number of the articles to the press. So whereas on the one hand the right of prisoners to freedom of expression, to publish, and to be heard is not yet fully respected, although there has been significant progress, on the other hand the prison service has taken upon itself the authority to leak information about particularly famous or infamous prisoners to the press, often in a way that smacks of a public campaign against these prisoners. Examples of which include the leaking of personal information about Tali Fahima (a Jewish woman who was tried and convicted for her ties with Zakaria Zubeidi, a Palestinian militant), releasing a tape of Marwan Barghouti allegedly eating in his prison cell during a hunger strike, and personal information relating to Yigal Amir and others. To redress such behavior we recently appealed to the Supreme Court on behalf of Tali Fahima after months of correspondence failed to stem the flow of the information relating to her and other prisoners, or to bring about any change in the Israel Prison Service [IPS] policy on the issue. In effect, the IPS is singling out prisoners because of their high profile notoriety. Our argument is that the prison service is supposed to act with a certain amount of professional neutrality, and to treat the prisoners it holds as people the court has sent them to serve a term of punishment; it has no mandate to wage public campaigns against certain prisoners. We are hoping that as a result of our appeal against these violations of Fahima’s right to privacy, the court will issue instructions to the IPS outlining an appropriate modus operandi for this issue, and that it will limit the IPS’s authority to issue press statements containing personal information.
Question: How has ACRI’s prisoner’s hotline impacted on Israel’s prison population?
Basically what our hotline provides is an address for prisoners who can’t necessarily reach the prison officials they need to reach in order to hand in a request or submit a complaint. Once we are made aware of the problem, through the hotline, we can help solve it by corresponding with the prison authorities, bringing about a re-evaluation of an individual’s case, or by achieving direct access to the officer in charge of the IPS Public Complaints Commission. The hotline does have an impact in the sense that people realize that they have someone to call, even if we cannot intervene in every case, but the mere fact that they have someone who will listen to them who is in a position to bypass some of the restrictions that are placed in their way when they try to submit a formal complaint, is significant. The hotline also provides us with an important channel of information from the prisons to know what the main problems are and how the detention facilities are functioning.
Question: Is it possible to install an efficient system of checks and balances in a criminal justice system that will effectively protect the prison population behind closed doors?
I think that one of the things that is missing, and is necessary to create an effective system of checks and balances to protect the prison population, is an independent ombudsman who would not only act as an address for prisoners complaints, but would also be able investigate them and actually do something about them. Currently prisoners can hand in petitions to the District Court that are defined as “prisoners petitions”, and indeed, the court does represent a very important channel of redress for prisoners’ grievances, however it does not conduct independent fact-finding, and is often forced to rely on the reports of the prison authority itself. To date, no independent body exists that can carry out this kind of fact finding task effectively. The only existing authoritative body is an individual employee of the Ministry of Internal Security who is charged with handling prisoners’ complaints, but this cannot be compared to an independent ombudsman who would be granted clearly defined powers, which are legally endorsed, and would require the prison service, by law, to provide information that would enable regularized and thorough investigations.
Question: What was the background to ACRI’s decision to successfully fight for greater transparency of Parole Board decisions?
Many prisoners are released after two-thirds of their sentence, which is known as early release, and other prisoners aren’t, all of which is decided upon by the parole boards that have a tremendous amount of authority to decide how long a prisoner’s sentence will be. Traditionally, the decisions of the parole board have not been published which made it very difficult for the public and human rights organizations to follow the work of the parole boards, to know for example whether the parole boards in the north are deciding the same as parole boards in the south, and to know what, if any, uniformity there is in the work of the different parole boards, or to ensure public scrutiny of its actions. In addition to which, defense attorneys who represent prisoners before parole boards had no access to previous decisions (unless they happened to hear of a relevant case and were able to call the lawyer to get hold of the decision), and were unable to refer to previous decisions to demand that the same standard be applied to their case, both of which are basic legal tools. Whereas the State Attorney’s Office does have access to these decision as state advocates appear in all parole board cases and it is relatively easy for them to keep accessible files. By providing a viable means of publishing the decisions, the prisoners themselves and their lawyers would be assured access and the right to due process.
Question: What, to date, do you think ACRI’s greatest achievements have been in the field of criminal justice?
One of the most important historical issues of criminal justice has been to raise awareness of conditions in detention centers, and ACRI was actually the first organization to conduct independent ongoing visits of police detention facilities. ACRI is also one of the only organizations that has succeeded in consistently bringing to the forefront of public awareness issues such as the presumption of innocence, the right to a fair trial, and the right to have an attorney. In a landmark case ACRI petitioned the Supreme Court a number of years ago to broaden eligibility to a public defender, and as a result great strides have been made in increasing accessibility to this service. ACRI has also acted as a legislative watchdog over the years, overseeing legislation that comes before the Knesset and ensuring that the language of rights in the criminal process is heard on a regular basis in the legislative process.
last updated : 15/03/06
