The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has criticized the decision to prosecute a rabbi for an article he published criticizing the former chief rabbi of the Israel Defense Forces<\/em><\/p>\n\n
On December 31, 2012, Rabbi Elitzur Segal was convicted of insulting a public servant after publishing an article on a website that criticized former Chief Military Rabbi Israel Weiss. Rabbi Segal was sentenced to a suspended prison term of six months, a NIS 3,000 fine and was ordered to pay compensation of NIS 4,000 shekels.<\/p>\n
\n
ACRI believe that the punishment handed down to Rabbi Segal is extremely harsh, and is concerned in particular by the jail sentence – even though it is suspended – that was imposed for a public expression.<\/p>\n
\nAttorney Lila Margalit, director of human rights in criminal proceedings at ACRI explained: “In a democratic society, citizens have\u00a0the right to criticize public officials in a harsh and even abusive manner. Putting a person on trial for a critical article about a senior officer \u2013 as harsh as it may be \u2013 is a serious infringement on freedom of expression, which is so essential to democracy. Use of the problematic clause of ‘insulting a public official’ can only be justified, if ever, in extreme scenarios \u2013 for instance when a public servant is insulted and cursed to his face in a manner that substantially harms his ability to do his job.”<\/p>\n
\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has criticized the decision to prosecute a rabbi for an article he published … Read more…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-democracy-and-civil-liberties","category-freedom-of-expression"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5498"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5498\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5501,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5498\/revisions\/5501"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/law.acri.org.il\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}