Levin says if he’s reelected, liberal Supreme Court justices ‘will become extinct’

Justice Minister Yariv Levin has said liberal Supreme Court justices “will become extinct” if the current hard-right government gets another term, Kan news reports.

The network airs a recording of Levin at a recent meeting with Likud activists. The minister — who led efforts to overhaul the judiciary and whose term in office has been marked by repeated public clashes with the justice system and efforts to bend it to his will — is heard saying he’d held a conversation with a Supreme Court judge in which the judge said that Levin’s preferred candidates for court judges were “not up to our standards.”

“I told him, and I keep telling the judges all the time, that I believe we will win,” Levin says.

And with two-thirds of the Supreme Court justices up for replacement in the next few years, “We won’t need judicial reform anymore. You will simply become extinct.”

Levin says he plans to make appointments “that will fundamentally change the court,” naming as examples conservative legal scholar Aviad Bakshi, who is head of the legal department at the Kohelet Policy Forum, and Raphael Bitton, an architect of the judicial overhaul.