No letters for Vanunu
Supreme Court rules that nuclear whistleblower Vanunu will not get back letters he wrote in prison, citing security reasons
Vanunu petitioned the court to receive copies of the letters he wrote during his 17 year imprisonment for exposing Israel's nuclear weapons program.
During this time he wrote 2,543 letters, which were censored before they were sent friends and supporters throughout the world. Vanunu kept copies and marked the words and sentences that were censored.
Vanunu claims in his petition that the director of Shikma Prison in Ashkelon, where he served his sentence, promised him that all the documents that were taken away from him will be checked and returned to him, but it did not happen.
Prison security officials determined that the letters contain secret and classified information, and therefore it is impossible return them back to Vanunu.
'Decision is absurd'
Attorney Dan Yakir of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, who represented Vanunu, claimed that the prison director has no right to confiscate property even if it is done for security reasons.
He also said that since the letters were already sent around the world after being censored, they pose no threat, and therefore Vanunu should get at least the censored copies, if not the originals.
The three judges decided that the security reasons the prison director and the security officials provided are legitimate. They said the censored copies were not saved, and it is impossible to censor the letters again.
Vanunu arrived in court on Monday accompanied only by Yakir, and refused to respond to the ruling. Yakir responded by blaming the Defense Ministry.
"It is absurd that he was allowed to send the letters out to people around the globe, but he is not allowed to have their copies," he said. "If the Defense Ministry was negligent and did not keep copies of the censored letters it is their problem, not Mordechai Vanunu's."
