UK
Charedi man fights extradition to Israel by arguing that prison could be hit by Hamas rocket
Efraim Grinfeld also told High Court that overcrowding in Israeli prisons would violate his rights
March 7, 2025 17:56
Efraim Grinfeld also told High Court that overcrowding in Israeli prisons would violate his rights
March 7, 2025 17:56A strictly Orthodox Israeli who said he should not be extradited from the UK because of the risk of being hit by a Hamas or Hezbollah rocket while in prison in Israel has lost his latest appeal.
Father-of-eight Efraim Grinfeld also argued at the High Court in London that prisons in Israel would be too overcrowded to house him in acceptable conditions because of the influx of security detainees following Hamas’s attack on October 7 2023.
Grinfeld had been standing trial in Israel on charges of taking part in a riot outside an electronic store selling DVDs and MP3 players in the strictly Orthodox neighbourhood of Geula in Jerusalem in the summer of 2008. He denied taking part in any violence and said he had been reading Psalms during the incident.
While he was awaiting the verdict in 2012, he, his wife and their then three children left the country for Canada before moving to London in 2016.
But an appeal not to be sent back to Israel failed in August 2023, when the judge said that although he had led “a law-abiding life” in the UK, he remained a “fugitive of justice”.
However, the High Court subsequently allowed him to reopen his appeal, after hearing that “prison overcrowding had worsened significantly” in Israel, in part owing to the number of inmates detained for security reasons following October 7.
In their ruling, Lord Justice William Davis and Mrs Justice McGowan referred to evidence submitted on Grinfeld’s behalf from an Israeli lawyer, Nick Kaufman, that “prisons generally do not have shelters” and that while its Iron Dome defence was very effective, only 90 per cent of rockets were intercepted.
Israel’s State Attorney however countered that some prisons “have purpose built shelters,” according to the High Court judges’ summary. “Those that do not have shelters operate protected areas in the same way as any building or institution without a shelter.”
Grinfeld also cited threats from Iran’s political leaders to deliver a “crushing response” to Israeli military strikes on it.
But in their decision, the judges noted that Israel’s “civilian population lives under threat but with significant protection from the state. Even when the conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah was at its height, the evidence does not show that there were significant civilian casualties. In Israeli prisons there were no casualties at all.”
They did not agree that Israel had a duty to house Grinfeld in a prison with a shelter.
They also heard that Israel’s Supreme Court had ruled that by April 2019 every prisoner in Israel was to have an exclusive space of at least three square metres - but that in May last year the Israeli authorities reported that 55 per cent of prisoners did not have that amount of space.
But the judges received assurances from Israel that if detained there, Grinfeld would have “at least three square metres (not including sanitary units)”.
They concluded, “Even in the extraordinary circumstances which developed as a result of the October 7 attack, namely an influx of thousands of security prisoners into a prison estate relatively modest in size, criminal prisoners in the middle of 2024 were much more likely than not to have three square metres of personal space.”
The way Israel had dealt with events in October 2023 “vis-à-vis the prison population does not demonstrate a lack of control,” they said. “In the face of extraordinary pressure the prison estate was not overwhelmed.”
Grinfeld could still try to take his appeal against being returned to the Supreme Court in London.