High Court gives government 5 days to respond to petitions against firing AG

The High Court of Justice orders the government to respond by Sunday (June 15) to petitions demanding that a cabinet resolution passed this week, to change the way the attorney general is fired, be frozen.

Justice Noam Sohlberg adds that if Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara decides not to represent the government’s position, the government will be able to file its own response separately.

On Sunday, the government passed a cabinet resolution giving a five-member ministerial committee the authority to recommend to the government whether or not to fire the attorney general, bypassing the professional, statutory committee that had been tasked with that duty until now.

The government had failed to fully staff the professional committee, so it amended the dismissal process through its cabinet resolution in order to proceed with firing Baharav-Miara, with whom the government has repeatedly clashed.

The Movement for Quality Government in Israel, one of the primary petitioning organizations, claimed in its petition that the government’s decision to change the dismissal process was made “with a clear conflict of interest between the prime minister and nine other ministers who are under criminal investigation, without a factual foundation, with extreme arbitrariness and with a single goal: to dismiss the legal advisor as soon as possible.”

The petitions request that the court invalidate the resolution and freeze its implementation until a final decision is made.

“The court’s decision to set a close date for response testifies to the seriousness of the situation,” says head of the Movement for Quality Government Eliad Shraga.

“We call on the court to stop this unacceptable move and save the country’s most senior [law enforcement] gatekeeper from arbitrary dismissal. The fight for the future of Israeli democracy is currently underway in the High Court, and the clock is ticking.”