Perhaps it is unsurprising that Meir Shamgar made the rule of law his avocation. He was born and raised in an environment which depended on the maintenance of law: the then-international city of Danzig which, in the inter-war years, was administered by a High Commissioner appointed by the League of Nations. Danzig (now Gdansk) possessed a diverse population of Poles, Germans, Russians and Jews, and the delicate balancing act of administering the city collapsed as a result of calculated Nazi agitation which provided the pretext for Hitler to ignite the Second World War. He recalls being chased by street bullies, out to harm Jews. But he was lucky. Together with his family, he left Danzig in March 1939, arriving to a new life in Palestine a few months later.

His bad memories of Danzig are few and distant and he has never felt impelled, like some Holocaust survivors, to revisit the land of his birth. His career has been one of gradual but steady ascent, leading him to the post of Israel Defence Forces Advocate-General, Attorney-General, Supreme Court Justice, and, finally, President of the Supreme Court.

Shamgar takes pride in what he succeeded in achieving in all these posts, especially the introduction, as Advocate-General, of private lawyers and an appeals system into a military court system previously based largely on discretionary decisions.

Sitting in the club in Melbourne’s Hyatt, Justice Shamgar discusses what he regards as the most important of the reforms he brought to bear on the Supreme Court.

Israel’s Supreme Court, unlike appellate courts in most Western countries, has been both the first and last court of appeal, producing an unwieldy workload for its full bench of 14 justices. "The Supreme Court of Israel handles something like at least 7000 cases annually," he explains.

"This year, I think, it was more, which is an impossible number. By having this backlog, you actually deny the justice that was promised. Not only does this frustrate petitioners, but it also has repercussions on the justice system as a whole as seen by the citizens. I think belief in and credibility of the system is a basic attribute of a system of law as law is always based on credibility. Therefore, my reform, which I call ‘the creeping reform’ because it was introduced in stages, was to increase considerably the jurisdiction and power of the magistrates courts; to handle criminal cases involving sentences of up to seven years, and civil cases involving very large sums of money. I describe it as creeping because I decided to increase the civil jurisdiction from time to time in order to be certain that these additions became part of the effective working system of the lower courts."

Shamgar emphasises that the law must be expeditious, or else it creates great evils: "If you do not believe in the system, you always find ways to circumvent it, to find alternatives. You have, terribly, in many countries private systems for collecting of debts, and so on, and thereby you create pressure and mafias. You create the disappearance of the rule of law." Shamgar’s stewardship of the Israel Supreme Court coincided with the period of judicial activism in its Australian counterpart under Chief Justice Sir Anthony Mason. Shamgar rejects any obvious parallels; he has been less keen than some of his colleagues to pronounce any petition to the Court a justiciable issue. "There are things that are political which do not belong to the court. For example, the question of settlements in the West Bank and Gaza, which the court unanimously held to be a political, not a legal question."

The recent UN agreement in Rome to constitute an International Criminal Court of Justice, which was opposed by the United States, Israel and a number of Arab countries, has given this issue fresh interest. Some press reports on the agreement focussed on the possibility that Jewish settlements in the territories might now fall within the definition of a war crime, thanks to politicisation of the issue by Arab delegates (which has led Israel to regretfully oppose the establishment of the tribunal).

Shamgar is unambiguous in rebutting any such extravagant conception of war crimes: "I don’t know what the reports say, but I don’t regard the settlements as war crimes. There is no substance to such claims because all settlements are being constructed on public land and everything which is connected with the territories is subject to agreement between Israel and the Palestinians in the long-term. War crimes refer to forcible acts in war-time and examples of what constitutes a war crime are spelt out in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It never refers to such activities which do not involve harm to anybody andare always subject to political agreement at a certain stage. [Such claims] would be propaganda."

Justice Shamgar, who retired three years ago from the Court, must be circumspect about matters over which he no longer presides. "I don’t know the precise detail, but I don’t think this is torture at all. As far as I know, this pressure may take the form of lighting prisoner’s cells for many hours, interrogation for long hours and these sort of things. Not torture, though these things are obviously unpleasant. These methods are used normally to prevent bombings. Sometimes you don’t have much choice if you are trying to save lives. But I do not know about the precise questions now before the Court and would not comment on them."

A different subject about which Shamgar can comment is the case of Mordechai Vanunu. At the time of his conviction in 1986, Israel attracted criticism for using its intelligence services to ensnare Vanunu and bring him back to Israel to face trial for selling national defence secrets relating to Israel’s nuclear capability. Did this sequence of events raise legal issues which he, as presiding judge in the Vanunu appeal case, had to consider? "The Supreme Court already ruled on these question in the Eichmann case," replies Shamgar, referring to the 1962 kidnapping in Argentina of the Nazi war criminal by the Mossad, the alleged illegality of which was asserted by his defence counsel, Robert Servatius, in the subsequent trial in Israel.

"This appeal was rejected. No court will deal with the question of personal rights in cases involving official secrets. The Eichmann case has a very detailed decision on this question, referring to American precedents. The issue has arisen in cases of trying drug dealers who stand trial in America, where there is an international jurisdiction to try such cases under the international drug conventions. We made no innovations on this matter.

"The Vanunu case has been controversial because it was argued that Vanunu published information which he thought conscientiously was true and needed to be publicised, but every country has official secrets and you cannot leave it in the hands of an individual when he decides to divulge them. Only the authorities can decide when a certain fact can be published or not. In this case, this ideological issue is complicated by the question of selling secrets for money. If an individual makes this choice, he must bear the cost individually."

Another controversial matter which reached Shamgar’s court was the case of Ivan Demjanjuk, a retired American auto-worker who was extradited to Israel to stand trial on war crimes relating to his service in Nazi collaborator forces during the war. In this instance, not the manner of his arrival in Israel, but the strength of the case against the accused, came under criticism, some describing it as a second Dreyfus case.

Demjanjuk, convicted in 1989 as being the sadistic concentration camp guard at Treblinka dubbed Ivan the Terrible by his victims, had his conviction overturned on appeal to the Supreme Court. Was this a reflection on the reasonableness of the original conviction?

Justice Shamgar has no doubt that it is not. "There is nothing unprecedented about this. Several times, the court of first instance has decided a case in one way only to have its decision overturned on appeal. In this case, the system of government in the former Soviet Union changed and this permitted access to new official documents, including KGB files. Both the prosecution and the defence went to Russia and perused large numbers of documents and submitted them as evidence in the court."

As Shamgar explains, these documents created a reasonable doubt about Demjanjuk’s identity. Certainly, there had been neither trumped-up evidence nor concealment of information of use to the accused, as in the Dreyfus case. In fact, Demjanjuk, says Shamgar, had benefited from the court processes. The Russian files revealed evidence on Demjanjuk suggestive of war crimes committed at the Sobibor concentration camp, but as the charges related exclusively to his being the Treblinka guard, extradition rules prevented him standing trial on a different charge.

There is more I want to ask this man with a voice of sweet reasonableness, but our time is up and his next appointment beckons. It is not his first trip to Australia, but it is a short one, quite possibly one that has taken him away from scholarly pursuits at home that have occupied his retirement. After parting words both courteous and warm, and a gesture mindful of the solicitousness of a hotel staff member, he is on his way.