Israel cracks down on ex parte communications between judges and prosecutors

In the wake of a high-profile scandal in which prosecutors in a major corruption case exchanged private text messages with a judge about its planned strategy, Israel’s Supreme Court has announced new rules to prevent further one-sided communications.

Under the new rules all contact between the judge and the investigative and prosecuting bodies will only be made during court hearings. Aside from in the courtroom, no direct requests are to be made of judges, but rather are to be filled through the court administration.

This makes a great deal of sense, and gives the court system a chance to rebuild whatever public legitimacy it has lost from the scandal.

One thought on “Israel cracks down on ex parte communications between judges and prosecutors”

  1. Jordan , as far as I can recall , you read Hebrew , so , you may read the press release of the president here :

    Click to access Press%20Update%201-7-2018.pdf

    You can read there , that there is an exception to the new rule , that all communications to be submitted only during court hearing , and it is , when the file or investigation is very complex , then , after confirmation of the court , communication may be submitted directly to the secretary of the court .

    Thanks

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: