Hadash Knesset members are up in arms over the new policy of the Israel Prison Service (IPS) of limiting their visits to Palestinian prisoners to once a month. The policy, introduced by the new Prison Service Commissioner, Ofra Klinger, when she entered office last November, restricts the access of attorneys, MKs and other visitors who represent or can help the prisoners in any way. Hadash MKs were not informed of the change in policy and only discovered it last month when visit requests they made were met with rejections or delays. Hadash MK Yousef Jabareen (Joint List) said his request to visit senior Palestinian prisoner Marwan Barghouti was rejected last month, on the grounds that he “had already visited a prisoner that month.”

Palestinian graffiti depicting a defiant Marwan Barghouti, on the separation wall near Qalandia (Photo: Palestinian Graffiti)

MK Jabareen, who has submitted a parliamentary query to the Minister for Public Security, Gilad Erdan, on the issue, says the move infringes on the lawmakers’ rights and on their political activity. He said the Hadash MKs will do all they can to have the measure revoked “so that we can do our public duty.” Jabareen said that “visiting prisoners is an important, integral part of the job of parliamentarians in general, and Arab ones in particular, and such a draconian measure limiting the activity of MKs is unacceptable.”

At Jabareen’s request, the Knesset’s legal advisor, Eyal Yinon, looked into the matter and was told by the Prison Service that the limitation to MKs’ visits had been instituted with the approval of the IPS’s legal advisor. Other MKs from the Joint List recently complained that their requests to visit prisoners had encountered delays and red tape. “How can such a decision be made without notifying the MKs and the Knesset’s legal advisor?” asked Jabareen.

Attorneys representing Palestinian prisoners have been complaining that Klinger’s measures infringe on prisoners’ rights and deny them adequate legal counsel, by obstructing the work of their lawyers in prisons. As of last month, new Prison Service orders have made it more difficult for prisoners to meet their lawyers, which is explicitly their legal right. One such measure has resulted in the apparently intended harassment of prisoners’ attorneys who, after traveling to prisons in the outlying areas of the country, are forced by prison authorities to adjourn meetings with their clients and wait for hours until they are allowed to resume them.