Israeli Parliament Passes Law To Limit Judicial Authority

The law’s passage marks the government’s first success in its seven-month campaign to limit the apex court’s authority.

Israeli Parliament on Monday completed the preliminary phase in a larger and highly heated campaign to limit the judiciary’s powers by passing a law that restricts the Supreme Court’s capacity to overrule decisions made by government ministers.

The legal term “reasonableness,” which judges previously used to deny ministerial nominations and fight planning decisions, among other government initiatives, will now be prohibited from being used by the court to overrule the national government. 

This means that the executive arm of the government will have the supreme authority in appointing its ministers and setting goals for the country without judicial oversight. 

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The law’s passage marks the government’s first success in its seven-month campaign to limit the apex court’s authority. 

Previous plans to empower parliament to override the court’s rulings and give the government more control over who gets to be a Supreme Court justice in March were suspended after a flurry of street protests, labor strikes, and unrest in the military. 

Israel’s most reliable ally, the United States, under President Joe Biden, also opposed and criticised the move, but the bill passed regardless. 

A sizable portion of the population worries that the legislation will weaken Israel’s democracy and enable the ultranationalist and ultraconservative government to create a less pluralist society.

The government and its supporters argue that the new legislation will improve democracy by giving elected lawmakers and cabinet members more power over unelected judges to drive the policies they were elected to enact. The court could still overrule the government using alternative legal measures. 

The ruling coalition and its supporters often have a more conservative and religious worldview, and they perceive the court as a barrier to entrenching their views. 

The opposition typically holds a more pluralistic and secular perspective, and they see the court as a champion of their cause. This internal contradiction is a question of the future of Israeli society. 

Although undefined in any written statute, “reasonableness” has represented a thin bridge over the country’s political divide.

In Israel, courts typically view a decision as irrational if they determine that it was reached without taking into account all pertinent circumstances, without assigning each factor the appropriate weight, or by giving irrelevant variables an excessive amount of weight.

This threshold, according to the ruling coalition, was excessively arbitrary and permitted excessive judicial interference, but the opposition considered it a check on government overreach.