השופט אסף זגורי
השופט אסף זגוריצילום: אתר בתי המשפט

Family court judge Assaf Zagury said Thursday that “in 99 percent of the polygraph tests to which I sent the two sides in requests for restraining orders, the woman turned out to be lying”.

Judge Zagury is the Deputy President for Family Matters in the Northern District Magistrates’ Court, which is based in Nazareth.

He spoke at a conference dedicated to false complaints within the family, which took place Thursday at the Carlton Hotel in Tel Aviv.

Zagury was replying to a question by Attorney Moran Samon, Head of the Committee for False Complaints in the Bar Association.

He said that there is real difficulty in assessing the truth of complaints regarding domestic abuse, because the deliberations tend to be very short in time and are based on “a balance of probabilities.”

The phenomenon of false complaints “creates an unprecedented workload on the system,” he added, “because it precludes the discussion of the other matters that need to be discussed.”

Also speaking at the conference, Judge Nahshon Fisher, Family Court Judge in the Rishon Letzion Family Court, argued that “not every complaint that is not true is necessarily a false complaint.”

“Sometimes,” he explained, “you find that you are dealing with a complaint that is not true and a different interpretation of events by one of the sides. A false complaint, in my view, is one in which besides the harmful statements, there is malicious intent.”

Dr. Yoav Mazeh told the conference that he believes that false complaints are currently at an all-time peak and that lawyers should sue damages on behalf of clients who were damaged in this way. Judges, for their part, must award substantial damages in these cases. “Judges think mistakenly that a monetary fine will hurt the children, but that is like saying that mothers raising children should not be fined for parking violations,” he explained.