by David Isaac
Senior Knesset members have proposed a bill to remove the offense from Israel’s penal code, describing it as a catch-all used to prosecute public officials.
Senior coalition members have proposed a bill to legislate the “fraud and breach of trust” offense out of existence, describing it as “vague” and “a basket offense,” a catch-all used to punish public officials when it is unclear what law, if any, they have broken.
“Fraud and breach of trust” is the chief offense Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is facing in his ongoing trial.
Knesset members Ofir Katz of the Likud Party, who is the parliamentary whip, Simcha Rothman of the Religious Zionist Party, who chairs the Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, and Michel Buskila of the New Hope Party sponsored the bill.
“The law enforcement system uses this offense to discipline elected officials and public servants for things that are not considered an offense under the Penal Law, and can determine retroactively what is considered criminal according to their wishes,” they said in a statement on Monday.
“It should be noted that no indictment has ever been filed against a judge or an attorney for fraud and breach of trust, despite the countless conflicts of interest that have existed over the years,” the statement notes.
Many cases in Israel involving the “breach of trust” offense have been accompanied by abuse involving the media, “draconian wiretapping,” and invasive phone and search warrants. Those cases “later crumbled,” it continues.
According to the bill’s explanatory section, fraud and breach of trust doesn’t meet “accepted criteria in modern criminal law, and indeed, even from a comparative point of view, this offense has no parallel.”
The existence of this “vague offense” raises the risk of “unfounded indictments, unclear legal proceedings and even distortions of the law, while harming the public’s trust in the legal system and the resilience of the enforcement system,” it states.
Other countries, such as Australia, South Africa and several U.S. states, including Oregon and Florida, have abolished similar offenses on their books as they constitute a “violation of basic principles of law, justice, and morality,” said the bill’s initiators. Still other countries are in the process of removing the offense.
The bill would not only remove fraud and breach of trust but also establish offenses not currently addressed in the law, such as conflict of interest and trafficking in internal government information.
According to Ynet, the bill could impact Netanyahu’s trial, as a section of the bill states: “If an offense has been committed and the prohibition against it is repealed by the statute, the criminal liability for its commission will be abolished. The proceedings that have been initiated in them will be stopped.”
Netanyahu is accused of “fraud and breach of trust” in all three of his cases—1000, 2000 and 4000. Only in the last is he also charged with bribery.
On Tuesday, opposition leader Yair Lapid of the Yesh Atid Party demanded that the legal adviser to the Knesset prevent the bill from moving forward, citing a “serious conflict of interest,” Ynet reported.
“This is a declaration of war on Israeli democracy, and an attempt to turn Israel into a corrupt and backward state,” said Lapid.
However, Rothman told JNS that the bill was not tailored to Netanyahu.
“The abolition of the offense of breach of trust was in the Religious Zionism Party’s election platform. I wrote about it in my book even before I became a member of the Knesset in 2018, and this abolition was proposed by many on the left and the right, in academia and in civil society,” said Rothman.
“Unfortunately, many of the people who supported this important amendment are changing their positions for political and personal reasons,” he added.
David Isaac
Source: https://www.jns.org/knesset-lawmakers-move-to-scrap-breach-of-trust-key-charge-in-pms-trial/
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