Dispute breaks out in Judicial Selection Committee over judicial overhaul proponent

A candidate for the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court backed by Justice Minister Levin was blocked by liberal members of the committee due to his advocacy for restraining the judiciary

Jeremy Sharon is The Times of Israel’s legal affairs and settlements reporter

The Judicial Selection Committee meets for the first time in over 18 months in Jerusalem, on November 16, 2023. (GPO)
The Judicial Selection Committee meets for the first time in over 18 months in Jerusalem, on November 16, 2023. (GPO)

A bitter dispute broke out in the Judicial Selection Committee on Sunday, after a candidate for the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court strongly supported by Justice Minister Yariv Levin faced strong pushback on the panel.

Levin’s ire was raised by the representative of the opposition on the panel, Yesh Atid MK Karine Elharrar, who expressed strong opposition to the appointment of Ariel Erlich as a judge on the Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court, The Times of Israel has learned.

Erlich is the director of the Litigation Department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, a strongly conservative think tank that was the inspiration for much of the government’s highly contentious judicial overhaul agenda last year.

And Erlich was a proponent of some of the most extreme components of the planned overhaul, including giving the government control over the Judicial Selection Committee, and thus the judiciary, and requiring that judicial review over Knesset legislation be permitted only with a full panel of High Court justices and a supermajority of that bench.

Despite the dispute over Erlich, 10 judges were appointed to family, traffic, and juvenile courts on Sunday.

During Sunday’s committee meeting, Elharrar pointed out Erlich’s deep involvement in the judicial overhaul and said that someone who was “up to his neck in political activities” just six months ago could not now be appointed to the judiciary.

MK Karine Elharrar speaks at Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee hearing, June 25, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/ Flash90)

The Yesh Atid MK also accused Kohelet of having sought to “change the rules of game” and its ideas of having “caused divisions within the nation.”

As such, Erlich would need a “cooling-off” period before his candidacy could be considered, Elharrar insisted.

Supreme Court Acting President Uzi Vogelman and Supreme Court Justice Dafne Barak-Erez also voiced opposition to Erlich’s appointment, saying that he was low on their list of candidates for the position on the Jerusalem Magistrate’s court.

Levin reacted angrily to the opposition to Erlich and raised his voice during the meeting.

Ariel Erlich (Kohelet)

But since the justice minister did not have a majority on the committee to appoint Erlich, his candidacy was not brought to a vote.

Appointments to the lower courts need a majority of five of the nine committee members to be confirmed, and the coalition has the guaranteed votes of only three members — Levin, Settlements and National Projects Minister Orit Strock, and MK Yitzhak Kroizer.

Supreme Court Justice Noam Sohlberg, a conservative, was supportive of Erlich’s candidacy, with the latter having clerked for Sohlberg when he was a judge on the Jerusalem District Court.

Levin himself refused once again to call a vote on the candidacy of Judge Joya Scapa-Shapira for the Jerusalem District Court. The coalition representatives on the committee, particularly Strock, believe Scapa-Shapira to have been overly lenient in rulings against Palestinians charged with rioting and incitement offenses and are thus blocking her appointment.

According to a source close to the coalition, Vogelman is not prepared to vote on the other candidates for the six open seats on the Jerusalem District Court unless Scapa-Shapira is included in the appointments to that bench.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin speaks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a Knesset debate on the state budget, December 14, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

As he has done since first convening the Judicial Selection Committee in November, Levin is also still refusing to appoint a new Supreme Court president, which has led to an unprecedented situation in which the court has been without a permanent president for some six months for the first time in its history.

Likewise, the justice minister is still refusing to consider candidates for the two vacant seats on the Supreme Court. Sources on the committee say that Levin is still wedded to the judicial overhaul agenda of taking control of the Judicial Selection Committee, and believes that at some stage in the future changes could be made to the panel to give the government greater power that it could use to appoint two conservative justices and solidify the conservative majority.

Following the end of Sunday’s meeting, Levin and Vogelman issued a joint statement announcing the appointments that were made, all of them unanimously.

Two judges were appointed to the family courts in the Jerusalem District; two judges were appointed to the family courts in the Southern District; three judges were appointed to the traffic courts in the Southern District; and three judges were appointed to the juvenile courts.

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