It took four years to establish some kind of body to audit the Attorney General's Office.
Mistakes and errors in a series of major cases did not convince State Attorney Moshe Lador, who was on his back feet. Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein pushed and pushed.
In the end, a hybrid creation took shape: they didn't want to pass it through legislation, who knows what the crazy politicians will put into the law, so it was decided that the new commission would be established by an administrative decision by the Minister of Justice (and an enthusiastic supporter of the matter), Tzipi Livni.
Want more news, videos and stories? Join the Haredim 10 WhatsApp channel >>
As the endless process was about to end, State Attorney Lador entered the Justice Minister's office. "Are you aware that the new decision you are signing exempts the Attorney General himself from the scope of the review?""
""It can't be," replied the minister, who saw no reason why the advisor shouldn't be subject to criticism. "Read it," he told Dor.
The new oversight body was born disabled. It was established precisely for the big decisions that only the legal advisor to the government has the authority to make – to open an investigation against a judge, to file an indictment against a minister – but somehow Weinstein remained immune.
The advisor served as chairman of the search committee to select the new commissioner and he chose a very worthy judge, who is also a close friend of his, Hila Gerstel.
Gerstel's integrity is beyond doubt, Weinstein did not hide his friendship with her from the members of the search committee. But would the advisor have approved any chairman of a search committee in any office to find a close friend of his for the desired position?
The way the new commission was established, therefore, did not exactly convey the required moral purity. When the leader of the system applies criticism to everyone but himself, of course, it does not exactly convince the last advocates of the justice of the establishment.
Still, the lawyers' strike against the review body is clearly unjustified.
The state suffered hundreds of millions in damage as a result of our strike, the committee boasts. The Bar Association apparently still hasn't realized what world it lives in.
"The criminals' lawyers are threatening to complain about us to the commission," they whine. You can complain about judges to a special commission and about police officers to the police investigation department, and only lawyers are made of special, especially soft material that does not allow them to handle criticism.
State attorneys are perhaps the highest-quality public servants in the civil service. They are generally people with high integrity and a sense of mission. Still, Commissioner Gerstel's initial results demonstrate how necessary this oversight body is.
It takes the prosecutor's office, on average, about a year, Gerstel discovered, to close a case for someone who has already been decided not to prosecute. It takes another year on average to notify him of this. On average, not in extreme cases.
Has the Bar Association ever thought about what happened to a person suspected of crimes in these two years, two years after he doesn't know but it has already been decided not to prosecute him? How does he sleep at night?
Time and again I encounter these human silhouettes in my work. A normative person, often famous, is arrested, interrogated with a warning, and then buried in years of uncertainty.
Just look at what is going on with Gabi Ashkenazi now and what has happened to Rubi Rivlin and Roy Varmos from "Psagot" and Avigdor Yitzhaki (who was completely acquitted in the end).
There is not enough space to list all the names of the people who have suffered from this endless and unjustified delay. Of course the lawyers don't want to be investigated. They know that often these cases just sit for months without anything happening in them. Just like that.
There is also no real way for those under investigation to fight the phenomenon. They fear that their struggle will result in them being prosecuted in retaliation. Has the Bar Association ever thought about how it happened that clean people like Gilad Erdan are afraid to take on the legal case because they truly believe that if they go there, a case will be sewn up for them?
How did this happen to be the image of the prosecution? That the country's top brass are sure that the prosecution has no problem putting together a case? Is there a chance of changing this image without an independent review body, which will examine who is really responsible for the fact that the Yvette Lieberman case dragged on for so many years (oh, I forgot, the attorney general is above review)?
Finally, I'm dying to understand the brilliant political logic of the Bar Association.
Yes, we will win and cancel the establishment of the institution of review of the prosecutor's office, and the new government will surely stand by and applaud us.
Yariv Levin, Ze'ev Elkin, and Ayelet Shaked are such staunch supporters of the prosecution that it would never occur to them to simply bring a bill to the Knesset that would enshrine Livni's decision and make it worse. What will the prosecution do then? Will they protest?
• Raviv Drucker's blog: http://drucker10.net
