What Happens When Someone Refuses a DNA Test

Israeli Law, Paternity Testing, and the Price of Silence

For decades, courts have been developing tools to resolve one of the most painful disputes in family law: establishing biological paternity. Genetic testing — tissue typing, as it was once called — has earned the title of the “gold standard” of evidence in this domain, yet one of the parties not infrequently refuses to undergo it.

Since a landmark Supreme Court ruling in 1980, Israel has operated under a clear principle: refusing to take a test is itself evidence — and powerful evidence at that.

The Genetic Information Law, enacted in 2000, brought order to what had been a patchwork of case law and was subsequently amended to explicitly empower courts to issue compulsory testing orders.

When a test cannot be conducted at all, courts do not simply give up. They either draw adverse inferences from the fact of non-compliance or allow paternity to be established through other means — all in service of the overriding principle that guides family law: a child’s right to know who their father is.

Tissue Doesn’t Lie — and Courts Have Known That Since 1980

The year is 1978. An unmarried bank employee claims she spent five years in a secret relationship with a married client and bore him a daughter. The man flatly denies everything, saying he merely gave her a ride occasionally. The court heard both sides and found itself at an impasse: two irreconcilable accounts, neither definitively disproving the other. It was at this point that the claimant’s attorneys made an unprecedented request in Israeli litigation — that the court turn to a new technique: HLA tissue typing, which could establish biological parentage with a high degree of certainty. The defendant refused.

The case reached the Supreme Court of Israel, which in 1980 handed down a decision that became the cornerstone of all subsequent practice. The justices held that a court has no power to compel the extraction of biological material from a person without express statutory authority — bodily integrity being a fundamental human right. But that conclusion was only the first half of the formula. The second half was this: anyone who refuses, without reasonable explanation, to undergo a test that could settle the matter transforms that refusal into evidence — and the court is entitled to draw whatever inferences from it the circumstances warrant.

In that same case, the Supreme Court took care to explain what set HLA typing fundamentally apart from the traditional ABO blood group analysis. Conventional blood testing could only exclude paternity — it could show that a man could not be the father, nothing more. Tissue typing went considerably further: it could positively confirm biological parentage rather than merely rule it out. The probability of two unrelated individuals sharing the same tissue markers by chance was approximately one in a thousand. For its time, this was a revolutionary finding, and the Supreme Court sent an unambiguous signal to lower courts: in paternity proceedings, this type of testing should be the starting point, not a last resort. If the defendant agreed, the result would be the centrepiece of the evidence. If he refused, that refusal would weigh against him.

What the Law Says: A Framework for a Sensitive Question

Twenty years on, in 2000, the Knesset enacted the Genetic Information Law. The legislation was designed to systematise what the courts had been piecing together decision by decision and to give the field a coherent statutory shape. The law rests on two competing values. On one side stands the right to privacy over one’s genetic data — among the most intimate information that exists about a person. On the other stands the interest of society and of individuals in establishing the truth about family ties.

As a general rule, the law requires the informed consent of the person from whom biological material is to be taken. Without that consent, genetic testing simply cannot proceed. The legislature did, however, carve out an exception — and it is this exception that shapes all subsequent case law. Section 28(vi)(a) provides that a court may order genetic testing without the subject’s consent if two conditions are met: the court must be satisfied that the applicant’s claims about the relevant family connection have a reasonable probability of being correct, and the subject must have been given an opportunity to state their objections.

It is worth noting that the law does not require paternity to be proved at the point when a testing order is sought. A “reasonable probability” suffices — a standard that courts have interpreted as lower than the balance of probabilities on the merits. Each case is assessed on the totality of its circumstances, and courts have deliberately resisted rigid criteria: what counts as sufficient for reasonable probability depends on the specific situation.

Where the person to be tested is a minor or lacks legal capacity, the law imposes stricter conditions and special safeguards. In particular, where the test results might call into question the religious validity of the marriage into which that person was born — and therefore their own halakhic status as a future party to a religious marriage — the court is required to seek an opinion from the President of the Grand Rabbinical Court.

In one of the cases discussed below, the court invoked this procedure even in relation to an adult woman — “out of an abundance of caution,” as the judge put it — and received confirmation that since the claimant’s mother had not been married at the time of conception, there was no risk of a mamzer (illegitimacy under religious law) determination.

A 2008 amendment to the law added another tool: courts may not only draw adverse inferences from a refusal to comply but may also hold the non-complying party in contempt, imposing a fine or even detention, where a testing order has taken effect and is being ignored.

Refusal as Admission: When Silence Speaks Louder Than Words

The rule that “refusal counts against you” is not merely theoretical. It plays out again and again in real courtroom stories, each with its own twist.

Consider a 2022 case heard on appeal by the Tel Aviv District Court. A man dying of terminal cancer learned, shortly before the end of his life, that the woman he had always believed to be his daughter might not be his daughter at all. The news came from the woman herself — together with her mother, with whom he had been estranged for years. The trigger was a private genetic test the woman had undergone abroad for medical reasons: it had revealed that her genome pointed to a father of European ancestry, whereas her legal father was from North Africa.

The man applied to court for an official genetic test. The woman refused outright. Her objections came in several forms: the statute of limitations, the man’s alleged bad faith, and the test itself — a “reopened trauma,” a threat to her and her children’s religious status, a disruption to her psychological equilibrium. The court of first instance weighed the arguments and issued the testing order. The appellate court upheld it.

Judge Shaul Shochat, hearing the appeal, was direct. Yes, he said, the woman bears no fault. Yes, from her perspective the test serves no purpose — she wants to hold on to her version of the truth. But she is not the only person in the picture. It was she who, after years of estrangement, arrived at a dying man’s door with a shattering revelation that upended his world. A man at the end of his life has the right to know who his children are. That desire is entirely legitimate.

The judge also noted that in assessing “reasonable probability,” the court had not even needed to rely on the private test that had set the whole affair in motion. The correspondence the woman and her mother had exchanged with the man immediately after their disclosure was enough. In those messages, both women — each in her own way — had effectively confirmed that he was not the biological father. The daughter wrote that she was “grieving and angry,” that “until two days ago she had a father who didn’t want her,” that she was “glad, for want of a better word,” and that “this discovery lifted the blame from him.” When asked in court why she was now insisting on the contrary, she had nothing coherent to say. That was enough.

A very different scenario arose in a case heard by the Tel Aviv Family Court a few months earlier. A putative father had himself initiated paternity proceedings in respect of two children — and then simply left the country and was never heard from again. The mother asked the court to find him the legal father on the basis of the evidence already before it, without waiting for genetic testing. The prosecution objected. The court dismissed the application — not because such a finding is impossible in principle, but because the evidence on hand fell short of the required threshold. The judge explicitly noted, however, that the mother was entitled to return to court if she found a way to obtain testing — either from the putative father himself, wherever he might be, or from his close relatives.

Against Their Will and Out of Reach: Extreme Scenarios

What happens when someone not only refuses to be tested but is physically beyond the reach of the court? This puts the entire statutory framework to the test — and case law answers it differently depending on the circumstances.

In a case heard by the Jerusalem Family Court in 2025, the putative father of two children had initially consented to testing and even signed an affidavit to that effect. The mother and children underwent the test. The father, a West Bank resident without Israeli residency status, first cited the security situation as an obstacle, then simply stopped appearing at hearings, despite having duly received every summons. The court fined him for contempt; he ignored the fine. The court scheduled further hearings; he did not attend. The prosecution pressed the court to either compel his compliance or close the file.

The judge disagreed. In a carefully reasoned decision, she drew a distinction between two questions: how paternity is proved, and which particular form of proof is mandatory. Genetic testing, she reminded the parties, is the best and most reliable way to establish biological parentage — the gold standard in this field. But Israeli law has never required a party to produce the best available evidence. The standard of proof in paternity cases is the same as in any civil proceeding: the balance of probabilities. And that bar can be cleared by other means when a party has no other option.

The judge cited a Supreme Court precedent: “The principal route to proof of biological parentage is genetic testing. That said, there is no reason to close off the path for those who wish to establish biological parentage through other means.” The statement had been made in a different context, but the principle applies across the board. More to the point, the court placed on record that the father’s refusal — systematic and without any justification — was itself significant evidence in favour of the alleged paternity. By evading the test, the man was not protecting himself; he was building the case against himself.

A separate chapter involves cases concerning minors. As far back as 2008, the Tel Aviv Appellate Court addressed a fundamental question: can a court order a child to undergo genetic testing if the mother objects and there is no unambiguous statutory authorisation? The answer was yes. The court held that the Genetic Information Law expressly confers on the family court the authority to order genetic testing for the purpose of establishing family ties — and that this authority covers both confirming and negating parentage, since “establishing family connections” within the meaning of the law includes a finding that no such connection exists. The decision on whether to test a child must be made in the child’s best interests — but it is the court, not either parent, that determines where those interests lie.

At the End of the Day, Children Have the Right to Know

Running through all these cases — different in their facts, different in their procedural twists — is a single thread: the right of a person to know their own origins. Israeli courts have long recognised this right as rooted in the very core of human dignity, well before it received constitutional expression in the Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty.

Justice Heshin, quoted by the Jerusalem court in its 2025 ruling, captured it with a literary quality rare in legal texts: “It is their natural right — the right of every boy and every girl to know who their father is, if they wish to know. A person is not a blade of grass. Every person has a mother and a father, and they hold a birthright — a right that comes from nature itself — to know where they come from. This is their dignity— Those born out of wedlock have the right to be freed from silence and concealment, and we will not stand in their way.”

Behind these words lies a thoroughly practical logic. A person who does not know their biological father is denied part of their family medical history, part of their cultural and ethnic identity, and often the legal protections that attach to recognised parentage. In an era when genetic medicine can identify hereditary conditions and open the door to preventive treatment, that information can be, quite literally, a matter of life and death.

This is why courts consistently decline to close a case simply because one party is being obstinate. Refusing to take a test is not a neutral act. It is a choice, and courts take note of it — often at a higher cost to the refusing party than they had anticipated. The woman who had maintained one version of events for years and then arrived with another only to walk it back immediately found that the court took both forms of her conduct into account. The father who agreed to be tested and then disappeared across the border found that the court was quite capable of moving toward an answer without him.

Conclusion

Israeli law has come a long way — from its first tentative experiments with biological evidence in paternity cases to the coherent, if not uncontested, system that exists today. The principle the Supreme Court established in 1980 has proved remarkably durable: refusing a genetic test is not a passive or neutral gesture; it is an eloquent procedural act, and its consequences fall squarely on the person who makes it.

The test itself takes minutes and requires little more than a saliva swab or a blood draw. Yet around this simple medical procedure unfold stories in which biology and identity collide, family secrets meet legal categories, and the refusal to know runs up against the impossibility of not knowing. Courts confronted with these stories invariably return to the same question: whose interests prevail — those of the person who wants to preserve their comfortable version of reality, or those of the person who simply wants to know who they are? Israeli jurisprudence has been growing steadily clearer in its answer: in most cases, the latter.