NOVANEWS
What does it mean when the Shin Bet calls you up for a ‘chat’?
The Shin Bet’s tendency to call in citizens to discuss their political activity has ACRI concerned. The Attorney General’s office says the service wants to keep innocent people from being exploited.
Following last week’s report that conscientious objector Yonatan Shapira had been summoned by the Shin Bet – for what the security service described as a “chat,” but his lawyers termed a “political interrogation” – the Association for Civil Rights in Israel called our attention to its own correspondence with the authorities regarding similar summonses in the past. The legal nonprofit is concerned that the very summons to the Shin Bet classifies the political activist as someone “harming state security.” The last letter from ACRI to the attorney general’s office on this matter was sent in December 2009, but a response arrived only this June.
At that time, attorney Lila Margalit wrote: “As we have already warned in the past, we have been witness in the last few years to the most worrisome phenomenon whereby citizens are called in for a ‘warning’ interrogation at the Shin Bet which appears to be directed at dissuading them from participating in protests or other political activity, and to obtain information from them concerning the political activities of others. This phenomenon deeply harms the legal rights of the individual and threatens, no less, to smash the delicate principles on which Israeli democracy is based.
Conscientious objector Yonatan Shapiro |
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Photo by: Archive |