Top military prosecutor Judge Peter Germanos has just announced his resignation on February 7th, citing ‘family reasons.’
He intends to submit a formal request to Justice Minister Marie-Claude Najem, on February 11th, to be relieved of his duties as a military prosecutor.
According to Naharnet, when he was asked whether his decision to resign was because he was not invited to the meeting of the Higher Defense Council, he denied and emphasized that his resignation is family-related.
Judge Peter Germanos is well-known for his involvement in the case against Suzanne el-Hajj, an ex-ISF officer who was charged with framing actor Ziad Itani as being an Israeli spy.
Itani was detained for 109 days before being released on March 2018.
She is said to have conspired with a hacker Elie Ghabash to fabricate evidence showing that Ziad Itani was a spy.
There were multiple recordings of conversations over the phone that have been broadcast on TV showing the El-Hajj and Ghabash talking about how they are going to manage to build a case against him.
The reason she wanted to frame him, as reported, is related to a tweeted post. A Twitter user with the same name had shared a tweet by a certain Charbel Khalil about Saudi Arabian women being allowed to drive and showing a screenshot of her like.
The tweeted screenshot resulted in her being terminated from the ISF.
Judge Germanos called for her acquittal because of insufficient evidence and she was since acquitted by the Military Tribunal. On the other hand, Germanos ordered the most severe punishment for Ghabash.
Judge Germanos is also famous for refusing to prosecute military officers charged with “homosexual activity” under article 534 that prohibits “unnatural sexual intercourse” and which carries a sentence of 1-year imprisonment.
In March 2019, when he was asked why he decided not to charge them, he said that “sodomy is not punishable by law” and that the article is not explicit in what it considers “unnatural sexual activity.”
However, the judge’s legacy hasn’t always been so rosy. In June 2019, he was one of the judges suspended after an investigation by a judicial watchdog into corruption in the judiciary.
This scandal was exposed after the arrest of some “brokers” who acted as intermediaries between the defendants and the judges.
