A decade after his release from prison for leaking information on Israel’s nuclear weapon program, Mordechai Vanunu has been denied permission to attend a human rights conference in London.
Vanunu, who was released in 2004 after spending 18 years in
prison for leaking details of Israel’s nuclear program to British
media, had planned to visit the UK capital for three days to
attend a conference sponsored by Amnesty International and
address the British parliament, Haaretz, the Israeli daily
reported on Monday.
Israeli Interior Minister Gideon Sa’ar and Attorney General
Yehuda Weinstein, however, refused to approve the trip. Vanunu
petitioned the High Court of Justice to reverse the decision, but
judging by previous appeals that does not seem likely.
Since leaving prison in June 2004, the nuclear technician has
been forbidden to leave the country or speak with foreigners
without permission from the Shin Bet security service.
The High Court has rejected seven successive petitions presented
by Vanunu’s lawyers to reverse course. Most recently, in December
2013, the court said the top-secret material they were shown
proves that Vanunu “still has a treasure of classified
information and hasn’t recanted his intent to disseminate this
information.”
In last week’s petition, Vanunu’s attorney, Avigdor Feldman,
reiterated the argument he has made in previous petitions: their
client’s information no longer presents much of a threat to
Israel’s national security.
“The information about Israel’s nuclear capabilities that has
been published since the petitioner’s release is incomparably
greater, both quantitatively and qualitatively, than anything the
petitioner could add today, more than 20 years after he stopped
working at the Dimona nuclear reactor,” Feldman wrote.
Feldman further argued that preventing Vanunu from traveling
abroad actually works more to Israel’s disadvantage because, he
said, the petitioner’s failure to appear at the Amnesty
conference and the British parliament “would spark
international protests against this severe administrative
restriction on Citizen Vanunu.”
Although Vanunu is no longer behind bars, his lawyers say he is,
for all intent and purposes, still a prisoner.
“It’s true the petitioner was released from jail, but his
freedom is still limited,” the petition said. “This is a
harsh punishment that has been imposed on the petitioner. It’s
not enough that he served a lengthy prison sentence; now, he is
restrained, and his freedom limited, as if he hadn’t finished
serving his sentence.”
Feldman told Haaretz that - to the best of his knowledge - the
constraints imposed on their client has no precedent anywhere in
the world. The ban on speaking with foreigners without the
security service’s permission “would surely be acceptable in
North Korea, but not in a country that defines itself as the only
democracy in the Middle East,” he complained.
In 2012, Nobel-Prize winning German poet Gunter Grass praised
Vanunu in a poem entitled ‘A Hero in Our Time’, in which Grass
describes the former worker at Israel’s
Dimona nuclear facility as a “hero” and a
“model,” admiring his decision to pass Israeli nuclear
secrets to the Sunday Times in 1986.
Meanwhile, Vanunu’s lawyer had harsh words for the High Court for
continuing the restrictions for the last decade on the basis of
material that neither he nor Vanunu were authorized to see,
“and about which it’s doubtful that any of the Supreme Court
justices understood anything,” but which they nevertheless
accepted as evidence that “Vanunu, who worked at the Dimona
nuclear reactor 40 years ago, knows information that would almost
certainly endanger Israel’s security.”
Israeli officials, meanwhile, insist that Vanunu’s determination
to threaten national security has not subsided, and the
information in his possession is still relevant.
Sa’ar wrote in his rejection of Vanunu’s request, “Your
client retains the ability to cause… damage, which would be
irreversible, via the information in his possession that hasn’t
yet been published, and which, as has been proven in court, is
still relevant even today.”
Following the failed petition to travel abroad in December,
Vanunu’s lawyer said his client merely wishes to leave the
country to “marry his girlfriend and live out his life
quietly.”
The Justice Ministry said that in accordance with the court’s
instructions, it would file a response to the latest petition by
June 10.