The Israeli lawyers for a former school principal accused of child sexual abuse
in Melbourne are trying to delay a hearing for her extradition to Australia.
In May a court ruled that Malka Leifer had been faking mental illness to avoid
extradition. Now her lawyers are appealing that ruling which could delay
the hearing scheduled for next week. Ms Leifer is facing 74 charges of child
sexual abuse alleged to have taken place when she was headmistress of the Israel
Abbas school in the early 2000s.
Let's get more on the story from our Middle
East correspondent, Eric Tlozek, who joins us out of Jerusalem.
Eric, I guess this appeal was no surprise?
That's right we always expected that the
defense team for Malka Leifer was going to lodge an appeal. Initially, though, we
were told that they weren't allowed to do so until the end of the extradition
proceeding and then they could appeal all of it to Israel's Supreme Court.
They argue differently. They say they have new evidence to introduce and that
the court must delay a hearing scheduled next week on the extradition matter
itself. Part of that is the fact that a civil claim was lodged on behalf of
Malka Leifer alleging negligent treatment by Israel's Prison Service. She's currently
on remand in an Israeli woman's prison and that suit alleges that because she
was given anti-psychotic medication, which has serious side effects, she must
have been assessed as being mentally ill. The independent psychiatric panel
that came back to the district court, which is hearing the extradition matter,
found that she was not incapacitated, that she was mentally competent to face
the extradition proceedings. It doesn't mean she's not suffering from a mental
illness; just that she's competent to understand the charges against her and
the and the nature of the proceedings against her. That's where
it's currently at, we don't have a date for the appeal before the Supreme Court
but it is it is an interesting development at this stage in the proceedings.
Is it likely to stop her eventual extradition?
Todate, every matter that Malka Leifer's defense has taken to the Supreme Court
- and they've taken a number - has been thrown out. They recently rejected her
bail when the district court granted her bail and was going to allow her to go
and live with her sister and the Supreme Court threw that out. They've thrown out
previous attempts by her defense team which has lodged a number of I suppose
you'd say "creative" applications to the district court and had some success with
them, but every time it's gone further to the Supreme Court they've rejected it.
I don't know what they're going to do with this appeal obviously, but if you look at
the record of matters that have reached the Supreme Court on the Malka Leifer
extradition proceedings all of them have been thrown out so I know that the
supporters of the three alleged victims and the victims themselves were alleged
victims themselves will be hoping that this matter is the same.
Eric, much like Victoria is facing Israel is in the grip of another wave of coronavirus
infections. Where are the main areas of concern now?
They just now started shutting down more cities because of some steeply rising infection rates.
Some places they're returning around 15 percent positive tests to
seeing really serious case growth. The main areas of concern are Jewish
ultra-orthodox neighborhoods, which have really high numbers, which make
up a really high proportion of the positive cases and the Arab-Israeli
cities and towns which are the next highest and there was concern about
public events, particularly in the Arab areas, weddings, where they were known to
be... now we know that they look like having been super spreader events and
there was a yeshiva in the ultra-orthodox areas that has a
high number of positive cases. So the authorities are belatedly trying to
respond to some of these outbreaks by quarantining whole areas but there's
enormous criticism of what they've done todate. They just introduced new
restrictions that close bars and clubs and
gyms and they limit weddings and other public events to 20 people.
This is after you're getting more than a thousand new cases a day for more than a
week. So it looks like there's widespread community transmission. A number of
experts have said that the government has lost control of the outbreak and
that they've squandered the time that Israel bought with its harsh lockdown
that it introduced in March. It gave them enough time to suppress new case
growth to just 16 a day in mid-May. So enough time to prepare but then they did
an implement they're serious contact tracing and testing programs that they
promised and now more than 33,000 cases and as I said
more than a thousand new ones being discovered every day. So Israel finds
itself in a really serious situation and that's spilled over into the West Bank -
occupied militarily by Israel - where there's more than four thousand cases
and just recently another death taking the total number there to 24.
A very serious situation with the outbreak there.
With such high density. Eric, thank you so much.
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