Avriel Bar-Yosef's defense team wrote to members of the government commission of inquiry established to investigate the use of spyware, demanding that it investigate and examine the use made in the investigation of Case 3000, the submarine case. In a 153-page letter of reference to the committee, Bar Yosef's defense team, attorneys Jacques Chen, Orna Pinto-Gafson, Yinon Sertal and Nir Lazar, describe the chain of failures and flaws that they believe fell into the investigation of the affair. Like using spyware without passing it on to the defense team.
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The defense attorneys for Avriel Bar Yosef, the defendant in the submarine case, are demanding that the commission of inquiry into the use of spyware by the police examine the use of spyware in the submarine case as well. Despite the position of the attorney general and the petitioners in the High Court, the defense lawyers say that such an examination is obligatory. The defense team also refers in a letter of reference to the position of the Attorney General, according to which the Committee's mandate should be limited so that it does not include examining the issue in connection with ongoing cases.
Former NSC Deputy Chairman Avriel Bar Yosef in court,
According to the defense team, there is no basis for this position and that there is no concern that the committee's work, findings and conclusions will "spill over" into the realm of criminal proceedings or lead to disruption of the trial, harm to the investigation of the truth, or harm the rights of defendants in general and their right to due process: "In our case, this is an unfounded concern. The commission's mandate is to examine law enforcement's use of spyware and the legality of its use. Under these circumstances, there is no basis for any of the concerns raised, but the opposite is true: as a result of the committee's work, the investigation of the truth will only benefit, the rights of defendants whose trial is underway will be promoted and their trial will not be disrupted in any way. It is not for nothing that these claims were raised without detail and minimal substantiation, which in any case does not exist."
Discussion of the submarine file (archive), photo: Gideon Markowitz
According to Bar-Yosef's lawyers, "the caveat in that committee's mandate, according to which it will not deal with or determine findings and conclusions regarding the defendants, does not at all remove the real concern that the very fact of dealing with the very same issue that is being examined in the criminal proceeding and through those witnesses who will testify at the trial may lead to harm to it and its proper management," the defense team writes, noting that in that case the attorney general gave, Under the same qualification, he doubted his blessing for the establishment of the commission and placed no obstacles in its way. "It is very puzzling to us how the attorney general argued in another government precisely in the matter you are dealing with, in which, as stated and by definition, the aforementioned concerns do not and cannot exist."
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