Anat Kam, who is serving a 4.5 year sentence for serious espionage and transferring secret information, filed a motion Wednesday to the Petach Tikva District Court asking to change the definition of her crimes in the Israel Prisons Service computers.

Kam claims that when she entered jail, one of the wardens told her that she had been convicted of treason, and that the term also appears in her computer file at the Prisons Service, as the definition of her crime.

MK Otniel Schneller (Kadima) reacted to news of the court move by saying that there would have been no need for Kam’s motion if legislation of a bill he has proposed were completed. The bill adds a new offense to the criminal code: holding secret documents and passing them on to an unauthorized person without permission – without intent to cause harm to the state. The maximum punishment for this offense would be 10 years in jail. 

This bill would have made it possible to convict Kam of harming national security without defining the crime as espionage.