Last update - 00:00 18/09/2006
Critics respond to police, prosecution's handling of Ramon affair
By Nir Hasson, Haaretz Correspondent
There is growing criticism of the state prosecutor's office and the police for their conduct with regard to former justice minister Haim Ramon.
The critics include former justice minister Amnon Rubinstein, the current president of the Interdisciplinary Institute in Herzliya, and former Meretz leader Shulamit Aloni. They say that the police and prosecution were over-zealous in persuading the plaintiff against Ramon to press charges and in deciding to indict Ramon.
"This is a strange affair, one that is hard to understand. I don't believe that in a complaint-non-complaint of this kind against a person who was not Haim Ramon, so much effort would have been invested," Rubinstein said in an interview with Army Radio on Sunday. "The police say all the time that they are short of time and manpower but they have the time and manpower to send two officers to get the 'non-plaintiff' to talk."
Aloni told Israel Radio on Sunday: "I believe the judges will be more clever than the police and realize that people are not robots and that this case sounds extremely strange and constitutes contempt for the law. This case is unfounded. They met, she flirted with him, she wanted to have her photo taken with him and gave him her telephone number ... It is possible that the police have other accounts to settle with Haim Ramon ... but how can they make a case and trial out of this? This means that human relations have ceased to be human relations and we expect people to be robots."