Yigal Amir, the jailed assassin of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, has been permitted to provide sperm samples for the artificial insemination of his wife, the Prisons Authority announced Tuesday.
Yigal Amir, serving a life sentence without parole for the 1995 assassination of Rabin, married Larissa Trimbobler by proxy in 2004.
The Prisons Authority initially refused to recognize the ceremony and has rejected the pair's demands to be allowed conjugal visits.
The Justice Ministry said it decided to allow the procedure after Amir, who was denied conjugal visits on the grounds that he could use them to pass political messages to his supporters on the outside, appealed to the Supreme Court.
Asked how Amir responded to the ministry's decision, his lawyer, Ari Shamai, told Israel Radio: "He sounded quite pleased, but can't say I heard any shouting for joy."
Amir will not be allowed outside the prison for fertility treatments, the prison service said.
"It is incumbent on the state to prevent this despicable and vile murderer from enjoying the privileges granted to other prison inmates, as the murder was committed against the State of Israel and Israeli democracy," Yossi Lahmani, director of the Rabin Center, said in a statement.
But civil liberties experts have sided with Amir, noting that marriage and child-rearing is a basic right enjoyed by other convicted murderers in Israel, including Arabs jailed for violent attacks.
"If we live in a democratic and liberal country, then even a murderer must be considered a human being," said Avi Saguy, a professor at Bar-Ilan University. "The state cannot deprive him of something so fundamental to his humanity."
An immigrant from the former Soviet Union and a divorced mother of four, Trimbobler corresponded with Amir and visited him under guard in an isolation block where the former law student is serving a life term with no chance of parole.
Rabbis declared the couple to have married under Jewish ritual law after Amir smuggled out a ring to Trimbobler using intermediaries.
"We realised that really there was nothing to stop Amir eventually getting a semen sample out to her as well," a Justice Ministry source said.
