חוק בתי המשפט (תיקון מס' 69), התשע"ב-2012Law of Courts (Amendment No. 69), 2012 · automatic translation · suggest a correction

What the sponsors propose

The bill seeks to amend Section 70 of the Courts Law and to add Sections 70a through 70d, which establish that, as a rule, the name of a suspect against whom an indictment has not yet been filed shall not be published for 48 hours from the time he was informed of the existence of an investigation against him, or until the first hearing in his matter, whichever is earlier, in order to allow him to petition the court and request a gag order on the publication of his name. According to the sponsors, in practice a suspect's name is sometimes published before he has had the opportunity to request a publication ban, which empties his right of content and may cause him irreversible harm, particularly when it later turns out that the suspicion was mistaken. The proposal establishes exceptions to the rule, including cases of public interest in publication or urgent investigative need, and also regulates the subject-matter and territorial jurisdiction of the courts to hear these requests and the possibility of appealing decisions regarding publication.

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An automatic summary of the explanatory notes written by the bill's sponsors. These are their arguments, not an official Knesset summary. · The bill on the Knesset website

What was said in the plenum

The law stipulates that, as a rule, the name of a suspect against whom no indictment has yet been filed will not be published for 48 hours from the time they learned of the investigation, or until a hearing in their case, subject to exceptions such as public interest, urgent investigative need, or the suspect's consent. The first-reading discussion focused on whether the arrangement adequately protects the presumption of innocence and the privacy of suspects, while the second and third readings were conducted mainly against the backdrop of a broader confrontation between the coalition and the opposition over laws concerning the justice system, in which opponents of the law argued that it harms freedom of the press and the public's right to know.

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An automatic summary of the plenum transcripts: the debate on the bill at every reading it was voted on. Arguments are given as the speakers made them; this is not an assessment. The list of speakers comes from the transcript, without a model. Transcripts of the sittings: 1, 2, 3

Reservations to the second reading

14 reservations were filed: proposed changes to the text the committee brought to the second and third reading.

The reservations to Section 2 seek to limit and supervise the mechanism for prohibiting publication of a suspect's name - to repeal the possibility of permission on the basis of public interest, to limit the duration of the ban and to require a hearing with the parties present with the participation of the Press Council, and to direct the notification duty only to a detained suspect who is unrepresented; the reservations to Section 3 seek additional changes to the procedure for hearing requests, such as repealing the hearing before a single judge and wording changes.

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By faction

• Meretz opposition · 12 reservations · 3 members
• Kadima opposition · 12 reservations · 2 members
• Yisrael Beytenu coalition · 2 reservations · 1 member

A joint reservation counts for every faction whose members filed it.

Proposers and reservation numbers are extracted automatically from the committee version, and the count is checked against the numbers printed in it. The descriptions are an automatic summary. The reservation numbers in this document cannot be read as text, so the count was not checked against it automatically. Committee version for the second and third reading (PDF)