"2. [...] "Public Place" means any place designated for public use, including a tourist site, hotel, hostel, guest house, public park, restaurant, café, hall used for entertainment and cultural performances, museum, library, discotheque, sports hall or facility, swimming pool, shopping mall, store, garage and a place that offers public transportation services;
[...]
3(c). In this law, "a person whose occupation" - includes the owner, holder or manager of a business, as well as the person actually responsible for the provision of the public product or service or for the operation of the public place or entry into it." (Emphasis added - A.S.)
- Thus, where the legislature chose to determine that a list is an open list, it said it explicitly, using the word "including." Therefore, if the legislature wished to determine that the list of grounds in section 3(a) of the Law is an open list, it would have used the word "including", as it did in section 3(c). In the absence of such wording, the obvious interpretive conclusion is that section 3(a) of the Law contains within it a closed list of prohibited acts of discrimination.
- Beyond the linguistic aspect, the explanatory notes that stood in the background of the enactment of section 3(c1) of the Law reinforce the conclusion that section 3(a) of the Law is a closed list of prohibitions of discrimination. First, the title of the explanatory notes to the bill is "The Prohibition of Discrimination in Products, Services and Entry to Public Places (Amendment No. 2) (Presumption of Discrimination), 5770-2010" (emphasis added - A.S.). This title indicates that the purpose of the amendment is to create presumptions of fact in relation to cases of discrimination listed in section 3(a) of the Law, and not to add additional cases and to expand the list of protected groups.
In addition, the explanatory notes that stand in the background of the bill are worded as follows:
"In the years that have passed since the law was enacted, an attempt has sometimes been made to circumvent its provisions in order to prevent the provision of public service or entry into a public place. This is done by preventing entry to public places or providing services in public places for reasons that are not relevant to the matter, as well as by delaying entry to public places for an unknown period of time, while giving preference to certain groups in the population over others. Such a delay has often led to those who were detained giving up on entering or receiving service at those places.