The State Prosecutor's Office Audit Commissioner, retired judge Menachem Finkelstein, today published his annual report for 2022. The report shows that during that year, 402 complaints were filed against the State Prosecutor's Office, the Police Prosecution, the Tax Authority, and more. Most of the complaints were filed against the State Attorney's Office - 42% of them. Of the complaints filed against all the prosecution bodies, 20% of the complaints were found to be justified, amounting to a total of 87 complaints. In 2021, a rate of 114 justified complaints, which, relative to the number of complaints filed at the time, constituted, as in this year, about 20% of them. Out of 170 complaints filed against the State Prosecutor's Office, 47 were found to be justified, constituting 28% of the total complaints against it.
Retired Judge Menachem Finkelstein, Photo: Joshua Yosef
For example, an investigation of a complaint revealed that the District Attorney's Office has been handling a case involving suspicions of serious sexual offenses within the family for more than 3.5 years, and has not yet been completed. This is partly due to the continuation of the completion of the investigation carried out. The Acting Commissioner determined that although the State Attorney's Office did not exceed the maximum time periods set for handling the case, it appears that not enough was done to advance its handling. The Acting Commissioner noted that the continuation of proceedings, in and of itself, is liable to cause considerable harm to the legal process, as well as to the appearance of justice and the public's trust in law enforcement agencies.
Following the Ombudsman's decision, the District Attorney's Office announced that an indictment had been filed in the case. Similarly, an investigation of a complaint revealed that the handling by the State Prosecutor's Office and the Attorney General of an appeal filed against the closure of a case involving suspicion of violence against minors and abuse of helpless persons in a kindergarten took more than two years. As part of the decision, the Deputy Ombudsman examined the length of time for handling the appeal and found that the District Attorney's Office, and especially the Attorney General's Office, to whom the Appeals Department transferred the handling of the appeal, greatly exceeded the timetable for handling the appeal in accordance with the relevant directive of the State Attorney.
The State Comptroller announced: "I will also examine the conduct of the Justice Ministry and the State Attorney's Office in the NSO affair."
Another complaint that was found to be justified was against a municipal prosecutor who was found to have a conflict of interest. The Deputy Commissioner found justified a complaint alleging that a plaintiff in the Local Planning and Building Committee had a conflict of interest, because her husband serves as a board member of an association headed by one of the two defendants in the case, and that this is particularly serious in light of the prosecutor's return from charges in the case. The Acting Commissioner determined that caution should be exercised in relation to conflict of interest action, since it could significantly erode the public's trust in public servants in general, and in the judicial system in particular. The prosecutor should have refrained from handling the case, and at the very least sought instructions from the department to guide competent attorneys general.
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