On June 16, 2010,
HaMoked petitioned the High Court of Justice (HCJ) to instruct the Israel Prison Service (IPS) to abide by the law and the regulations, which require that it provide every prisoner or former prisoner whom it had in its custody their complete personal medical file. The petition was filed after the IPS failed to provide HaMoked with full medical information concerning prisoners and former prisoners who complained of
humiliating treatment and substandard conditions at the Petah Tikva Detention Facility, operating under the IPS. In the petition, HaMoked stressed that under the
Patient's Rights Law, every person is entitled to receive all of his/her personal medical information. HaMoked added that the IPS was the body responsible for the medical care of incarcerated people, and as such it was required to maintain and record all medical material concerning the inmates throughout their incarceration period.
Following the petition, a worrying picture emerged as the IPS medical records turned out to be highly incomplete: in April 2011, when the
State Attorney’s Office responded to the petition, HaMoked received full medical documentation concerning four out of the eleven prisoners whose files it had asked for; in two of these files, documentation was collected in full only at the request of the State Attorney’s Office, following HaMoked’s petition. Nonetheless, the State Attorney’s Office saw fit to argue that “all located medical information has already been provided, and therefore, the petition, on its individual issues, has been rendered moot”. Despite the significant gaps in the medical records and although the IPS regulations require that upon a prisoner’s admittance to the prison, his/her medical file be transferred to the IPS, the State Attorney’s Office maintained that the IPS was not responsible for completing the medical records of prisoners transferred from other authorities.
Contrary to this narrow interpretation of the IPS’ duties, HaMoked asserted that the IPS had an active duty to manage the prisoner’s medical information, which included the obligation to obtain missing medical information undelivered upon the prisoner’s admittance.
During the court hearing of June 20, 2012, HaMoked claimed that the IPS’s failure to keep complete medical records in the prisoners’ files was a substantive problem. However, the court was satisfied with the statement of the State Attorney’s Office, that “as a rule”, prisoners or detainees were admitted to IPS facilities with their medical files arriving also. HaMoked accepted the justices’ advice to delete the petition, while reserving the right to file individual petitions on behalf of inmates.
HaMoked’s request to instruct the IPS to provide prisoners with their full medical records received just a faint expression in the judgment, which ruled that “if [a prisoner reaches the IPS without a medical file], the IPS applies to the other authority to find out why the medical file has not arrived”. The court thus effectively compels prisoners whose medical file has been mishandled by the IPS to apply to the court in order to receive their own personal medical information. In the worst case, their fate would be like that of the three prisoners HaMoked had represented, who have not received to this day the entire information in their medical files.
