A Knesset committee has given its final stamp of approval to a law pardoning citizens arrested for protesting the 2005 expulsion from Gush Katif (the Disengagement).
The law would erase all criminal records and end criminal proceedings against people accused of offenses committed in protest of the 2005 expulsion. Serious offenses which involved actual risk to human life will not be included in the pardon.
For the offenses included in the pardon, all criminal proceedings would end, whether or not charges had been filed, and they will be deleted from the police and criminal records. The law also explicitly forbids law enforcement branches from transferring information about the suspicions and/or charges to other bodies, so as not to harm the military service or employment prospects of the protesters.
The law is expected to pass in the second and final readings on Wednesday. The wording was approved despite last minute opposition by Deputy Chief Prosecutor Shai Nitzan.
Bid to dilute law rebuffed
In the final debate regarding the formulation of the law in the Constitution, Law and Justice committee, Nitzan tried to enlarge the list of offenses that would not be pardoned. He urged the Knesset members to include attempted arson, assaulting a police officer and assaulting a public servant in the list of offenses that would not be pardoned. The committee did not accept most of his proposals but consented to remove one offense – endangering human life in a traffic route – from the list of pardonable offenses.
Nitzan informed the committee of the current state of the prosecutions against expulsion protesters. He said that 310 people were charged in court. 75 of these were convicted, and more than half of these served jail time. In 195 cases, the court found that they had indeed committed the offense they were charged with, but chose not to convict them. Only 30 were not determined to be guilty, and of these, only four were completely cleared.
85 people convicted of offenses had asked that the conviction be expunged from their criminal record and 65 of these requests were approved.
MK Uri Ariel (National Union) said in the course of the debate that “the pardon law which we initiated is indeed unusual, but it is the result of a grave deed, of the expulsion of Jews, while our request for a pardon without legislation was rejected by the State Prosecution. I believe that in view of the high number of convictions that did not end in incarceration, it is clear that the law is needed and we hope it will pass soon with the help of [G-d].”