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Israel’s Supreme Court holds an unprecedented hearing Tuesday to consider a direct challenge to its power, part of Netanyahu’s contentious judicial overhaul.
The Supreme Court has denied two government requests to postpone the hearing, which is expected to be unusually long, possibly stretching into the evening. A decision could take weeks or months, but must be handed down by Jan.
16.At a conference of the Israeli Association of Public Law in January, Supreme Court President Esther Hayut said the judicial overhaul legislation “is designed to deal a fatal blow to the independence of the judiciary and silence it.” But the law in question is known as a basic law, a protected category, equivalent to a constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court has never struck down a basic law and may be wary of setting that precedent. The court could determine that the law does not meet the threshold for invalidation, while signaling to the Knesset that future measures more obviously in violation of democratic principles might be overturned., passed by a Netanyahu-led government in 2018, which formally prioritized Israel’s Jewish character over its democratic one. The court allowed the law to stand, but narrowed its reach, ruling that it could not be used to deny Israelis their rights as citizens. “The implication of the ruling was that it was never used to justify discrimination, and ultimately the damage was minimized,” said Noa Sattath, the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which will be involved in Tuesday’s court hearing.The Supreme Court could decide to overturn the law on procedural grounds, pointing to the fact that it was fast-tracked to ensure passage before the end of the Knesset’s summer session, and voted through without input from critics or opponents. The judges could provide instructions to the Knesset on how to adjust the law to be constitutionally compliant, at which point lawmakers could rework the bill or table it to pursue other parts of the judicial overhaul package.The court could also deem the law to be unconstitutional, amounting to a fundamental breach of Israeli democracy. Under the country’s parliamentary system, in which the executive controls the legislative branch, the Supreme Court acts as one of the sole checks on government power.Israeli Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara said last week that “this most unusual situation” leaves the court “no choice” but to strike down the law, which she described as “a fatal blow to the foundations of the democratic system.”
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