Last update - 02:50 08/11/2006
Mazuz orders review of wiretap procedures
By Yuval Yoaz
Attorney General Menachem Mazuz plans to change police and prosecution procedures for wiretapping, after problems plagued wiretaps in the sexual harassment case against former justice minister Haim Ramon. Mazuz and senior prosecutors and police officers will redraft the rules for transmitting material related to wiretaps conducted during an investigation.
According to current regulations, faultily implemented in the Ramon case, when the need for a wiretap arises, the police ask the prosecutor handling the case, or the district prosecutor, to ask the court for an injunction permitting the tap. The police carrying out the wiretap eavesdrop on conversations either from taps on land-line phones or cellular ones, or by bugging a room or site, and determine if the conversations are included in a list of the investigation's targets according to parameters such as the speakers and the subject. If they believe the conversation is relevant, they continue to listen. If they do not believe it is relevant, they stop listening but recording continues.
This leads to recordings from wiretaps that are not listened to and certainly not transcribed. This occurred in the Ramon case: Since investigators do not transcribe conversations that are unrelated to the original investigation for which the eavesdropping was conducted, in this case suspicions that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office manager Shula Zaken was involved in obstruction of justice and efforts to dissuade plaintiff H. from filing charges against Ramon, they only discovered recently that some of the recordings related to the charges against Ramon himself, and these transcripts were only last week given to the Ramon defense team, after the start of the trial.
Due to a series of problems, detailed last week in a letter from Mazuz and attorney Raz Nizri to Ramon's lawyers, Mazuz asked police investigative division chief Yochanan Denino to reexamine the transmission of investigative material in general, especially regarding communications relating to wiretapping. Nonetheless, the Justice Ministry is not at this point commenting on Ramon's lawyer's demands that an external committee review the malfunctions in wiretapping in the Ramon case.