This is the Story of a personal friend of mine. I will call him O. O is going through a hellish divorce process from a greedy wife, with whom he has 2 children. O is just another one of those fathers who were ordered to pay child support higher than their actual income. O is currently unemployed, after he was layed off during the economic crisis. O has been ordered to pay a sum of 5500 NIS every month, equivalent to 1400 USD. For comparison, the average salary in Israel is currently about 1900 USD a month, meaning that O has been ordered to pay about 73% of an average salary (Before deduction of taxes!!), while he is unemployed. O is not a millionaire, far from it. At the age of 30, O has moved back in with his parents, and his economic future seems quite gloomy.
O and his wife were renting an apartment together. When they broke up, O has left the apartment, but kept paying the rent as the landlord had his personal checques linked to his own account (not the joint account of the couple). The court order clearly stated that O may deduct the amounts paid to the landlord from the child support payments, and so he did.
However, his greedy wife immidiately opened a legal case in the child suppport collection services against him, claiming that he did not pay the child support in full, addressing the amounts deducted with court's permission. O has claimed for his defense that the amouns has been deducted with the court's permit, and attached evidence that those amounts has actually been paid to the landlord for the wife's apartment. The court has scheduled a hearing to Mid-April 2010, more than 2 months away.
Israeli law clearly states that as long as such a claim is pending, no arrest orders can be issued against a debtor. about a week ago, O has recieved a notification from the court about an arrest order than has been issued against him. This means that every moment O can be arrested by the Israeli police and thrown to jail like a criminal.
The Arrest Order issued against O has no legal basis, and in this case it is the Israeli court, who is supposed to be enforcing law, that ignores the laws and the basic rights of O. O has been paying all the child support despite the financial hardship he is in. He is not a deadbeat dad. He cares about his children and he is a great and dedicated father. O might be soon arrested for a fictive debt that has not even been proven yet.
This is just another sad example, of how Fathers Rights in Israel are violated, even if in theory they exist in the laws.
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