Israel allocates $1m for officers facing war-crime charges

The state will allocate $1 million to defend senior army officers charged abroad with war crimes, if a bill proposed by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni is passed. The draft law will be submitted for the cabinet's approval at its regular weekly meeting next Sunday.

Livni has appointed a legal team whose mission is to persuade Great Britain and other European countries to change their laws so that foreign nationals cannot be prosecuted.

The justice minister convened an emergency meeting on Sunday in the wake of an incident last week, when Major General (res.) Doron Almog refrained from disembarking from an El Al plane in London, returning to Israel on the same aircraft, in order to evade an arrest warrant issued against him in Britain.

Among those supporting Livni's proposals in Sunday's meeting were Attorney General Menachem Mazuz, State Prosecutor Eran Shendar, chief military prosecutor Brigadier General Avihai Mandelblit and other senior legal figures in the military, the intelligence services and the Foreign Ministry.

The new team was directed to draft recommendations for trying to change legislation in European states whose laws embody the concept of "universal authority" and have provisions for prosecuting foreign nationals for human rights violations. These countries include the United Kingdom, Germany and Spain, among others.

The problem, according to legal experts, is that in Britain a complainant can petition a court to issue an arrest warrant against a suspect without the involvement of the police or prosecutorial authorities.

Some British diplomats, too, are uneasy with the current situation. They recommend adopting the Belgian model, which stipulates some kind of connection between the suspected crime and Belgium or its citizens as a precondition for prosecution.

"It's untenable to have a situation in which a soldier cannot step on the soil of a friendly country because some fly-by-night organization has decided to file a complaint against him," said a senior Justice Ministry official on Sunday.

The Justice Ministry will assess the current legal situation across Europe, including a country-by-country evaluation of the "risk factor" for prosecution for war crimes that each nation presents to Israeli soldiers and officers. As part of this assessment, Israel's European embassies will be asked to consult with local legal experts.

The newly appointed team will make recommendations regarding additional measures and will deal with any specific cases that arise.