Wednesday, June 01, 2005
Here's some good news via the Sunday Times:
A JUDGE has challenged 22 new charges levelled by Israel’s justice ministry against Mordechai Vanunu, the nuclear whistleblower. [ ... ]
“Judge Tzur threw out a charge that Mordechai had attempted to leave Israel when he once tried to travel to Bethlehem in the West Bank,” he said.
“We had pointed out that no Israeli needs a passport or identity card to go there and so it was not foreign territory.”
[Vanunu’s lawyer Michael Sfar] said the judge had also decided that charges that Vanunu had spoken to foreign journalists could not stand.
“He ruled that none of these amounted to maliciously breaching a legal order, which carries a maximum sentence of two years,” Sfar said. [ ... ]
Ernest Rodker, head of a UK campaign to free Vanunu, claimed the ruling was a breakthrough.
“It is the first time in Vanunu’s long history of persecution by the Israeli security services that their ridiculous charges against him have been seriously challenged,” he said.
