Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado; Photo credit: Honenu
Wednesday, April 7, 2021, 14:17 Several minutes before a deliberation was scheduled to begin at the Ofer Military Court of Appeals, Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado was informed that the administrative order over which he had filed an appeal had been canceled. The order had been signed only a few days previously and was not served to its intended recipient. Yado expressed a concern that there was a forbidden practice of orders pre-signed by the GOC being kept in a drawer and given to lower ranking officers as blank checks to be used if and when they want to serve orders.
Approximately three months ago, the GOC of the Central Command, Major-General Tamir Yadai, signed a warning for an administrative order that would be issued due to security considerations of great importance. The recipient was served with the warning only a month and a half later. In response, Yado sent a letter to the court noting that the warning had “floated around for a month and a half until it was pulled out of drawer and served, and it is not clear whether or not the GOC was aware of the delay. It is not clear whether the trigger for actually serving the warning was known to the GOC and acceptable to him.”
The warning was served to the youth very soon after he participated in a demonstration protesting the death of Ahuvia Sandak, z”l, who was killed in a police car chase in the Binyamin region, which raises suspicion that the officers in the field served the order as a means of penalizing the youth for demonstrating. After the warning was served, Yado sent a letter to the GOC asking him not to sign the order. Ten days later the GOC informed Yado that the request had been rejected and added a new signed administrative order.
Yado appealed the new order and approximately a week later was surprised to discover that the new order had not been served to the youth, and therefore was not valid. Yado himself informed the Central Command that the order had not been served: “It was a matter of ten days, during which supposedly there had been a need for the order and justification for it due to security concerns. However the order was never served.”
On his way to the Ofer Military Court of Appeals, minutes before the deliberation was scheduled to begin, Yado was informed that the administrative order – which had never gone into effect – over which he had filed an appeal had been canceled.
Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado: “The order was indeed canceled, but a concern remains that the authorities responsible for the failures are likely to repeat them. Therefore, we at Honenu intend to file a request with Military Advocate General and the relevant oversight authorities to examine the failures and to come to the correct conclusions regarding those responsible for the errors made along the way, from the first signature on the warning to the cancellation of the order minutes before the deliberation.”
Honenu Attorney Menashe Yado; Video credit: Honenu