Supreme Court justices walk out of Judicial Selection Committee to protest Levin’s invite to external experts

All three justices of the Supreme Court who are members of the Judicial Selection Committee walk out from a meeting of the panel after Justice Minister Yariv Levin, who chairs the forum, invited external experts to give their opinions on some of the irregular practices he is seeking to implement in the committee.

A spokesperson for the Judicial Authority said the justices, including Acting Supreme Court President Isaac Amit and Justices Daphne Barak Erez and Noam Sohlberg, left because they had a conflict of interests in the discussion regarding the use of the seniority system, whereby the justice with the most years on the court is the sole candidate nominated for president.

The justices are expected to rejoin the hearing after the experts leave.

The three judges wrote a letter to Levin yesterday protesting his invitation of the external experts, saying that the committee has never done so before and “that is how it has always been, and our position is that these arrangements should not be changed.”

In the war Levin has been waging against the judiciary for the last two years, he has sought and still seeks to dispense with the seniority system for the first time in the Supreme Court’s history in order to have hardline conservative Yosef Elron appointed as president.

Amit, a liberal, is a candidate for court president and next in line for the position under the seniority system, while Sohlberg, a conservative, is similarly next in line for vice president. The court’s spokesperson added that the judges also left in order to avoid giving a “bad impression.”

Levin invited conservative legal academics Prof. Talia Einhorn, Dr. Shuki Segev and Prof. Gidi Sapir, together with hardline conservative MK and chairman of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee Simcha Rothman, to opine on Levin’s proposals to broadcast the deliberations of the committee and discuss whether or not to appoint a new Supreme Court president through the traditional seniority system.

The committee already deliberated at length on the highly unusual request of Levin to broadcast the hearings, something which has never happened before and would require amending the committee’s regulations.

The justices said in their letter to Levin that they were also opposed to broadcasting the committee’s deliberations since it would harm the privacy of the proceedings and have a “chilling effect.”

The Supreme Court in its capacity as High Court of Justice is set to being a hearing this afternoon on a request for a contempt of court order against Levin, after he failed to call a vote for the appointment of a new Supreme Court president in the previous Judicial Selection Committee. The court ordered Levin in September to call a vote for a new president, which was supposed to have happened sometime in November.