Israel Supreme Court president condemns judicial reform plan
President of Israel’s Supreme Court Esther Hayut has strongly condemned the new judicial reform plan revealed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s coalition government last week.
Esther Hayut
Her comments came while speaking at the annual convention of The Israeli Association of Public Law in Haifa yesterday.
Hayut said that the reform would greatly harm the independence of Israel’s courts and would silence them. She added that this would make it impossible for judges in Israel to do their jobs.
She also criticised how the reform was presented by the Justice Minister last week and the fact that he waited only days after assuming office to present it.
“The 75th anniversary will be remembered as the year in which Israel’s democratic identity suffered a fatal wounding instead of a year to celebrate its democracy,” declared Hayut.
Hayut went to the heart of the matter – the plan to allow an absolute majority vote in the Knesset to override any Supreme Court ruling that overturned a law. This part of the proposed reforms has received the sharpest criticism from Israel’s legal community and members of the opposition because they maintain it would end democracy in Israel since there would be no “check” on the authority of the ruling coalition government.
“Democracy is not just the rule of the majority,” she said, and “anyone who says that the majority of voters gave their Knesset representatives a blank check to do whatever they want uses the word democracy falsely.”
President Hayut went on to speak of why it is so important for the Supreme Court to be able to overturn laws passed by the Knesset if they in some way harm the rights of the minority. She even quoted Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founding father of the Revisionist movement which was the precursor of Netanyahu’s current Likud Party, saying that his words showed that he understood this and why he would not approve of the reforms.
President Hayut also provided a number of responses to the criticisms that the leaders of Netanyahu’s government have made about Israel’s current judicial system. For example, to the complaint about there being too many judges, she pointed out that the ratio of judges to Israeli citizens is only one-third the average ratio in all OECD nations. She pointed out that there are 850,000 cases brought before the Israeli courts every year and so with fewer justices, there would simply not be enough hours in a year for all of these cases to be heard should the reforms pass.
She concluded her remarks by saying, “The meaning of this reform is a change to the democratic identity of the State (in such a way) that it will be unrecognisable.
President Hayat is due to step down from her position at the end of the Supreme Court’s term.
