Bereaved families NGO: Don't expect High Court to strike down prisoner release

Head of Almagor Terror Victims Association: Supreme Court President Grunis "looks at the issue from politicians' perspective."

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
Meir Indor 370 (photo credit: Facebook.)
Meir Indor 370
(photo credit: Facebook.)
Supreme Court President Asher D. Grunis is no more likely to block the recently announced release of 104 Palestinian prisoners with blood on their hands than was his predecessor Dorit Beinisch, said Meir Indor, the Almagor Terror Victims Association head, on Monday.
From Indor’s perspective, even if many view Grunis as less left-wing on certain issues, Grunis still “looks at the issue from the perspective of the politicians,” he said.
He explained that Grunis would likely view the release primarily as “an issue of state policy,” and not primarily about contempt for the court’s prison sentences and the injustice toward the prisoners’ victims.
Indor complained that he believed the court “has not been consistent” in applying its principles of non-intervention with state policy, as it refused to intervene to block the Gilad Schalit prisoner release, but has frequently intervened to order the state to “change the placement of the West Bank security barrier.”
Indor hopes to block the prisoner release with a public relations campaign, along with a recent letter that Almagor sent to State Comptroller Joseph Shapira.
He said that terror victims and their supporters would campaign “day in, day out” to fight the deal in the hopes of not being forced to file a petition with the High Court of Justice, which in any event cannot be filed before an actual release date is announced and about to be implemented.
Indor said that it is important that the public view the release not from the perspective of being a political choice, but from the perspective that, as he views it, such releases “undermine the entire standard legal framework” for bringing terrorists to justice, keeping them behind bars and providing justice to victims.
Indor noted the absurdity of a situation whereby prisoners who had only committed non-violent crimes would never be released as a diplomatic gesture, but prisoners “whose crimes were violent enough” could be, since those crimes were politically motivated.
Indor also labeled US Secretary of State John Kerry and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni “hypocrites.”
Kerry had opposed similar deals in other contexts, but not here, he said. Regarding Livni, he said that she could not be both the top law enforcement officer who sends people to jail, and at the same time the lead negotiator for peace talks, releasing terrorists from jail.