The High Court of Justice will hear petitions against the government’s dismissal of Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara before a panel of nine justices on September 3, Chief Justice Isaac Amit said Thursday.
Six organizations filed petitions that say the framework within which the firing was made was illegal. The process had circumvented all of the oversight mechanisms in place and served to target the independence of the legal advisory, making it political, they said.
The expanded panel indicates the gravity of the case. Amit will chair it, and joining him will be the court’s most senior justices: Deputy Chief Justice Noam Sohlberg and Justices David Mintz, Yosef Elron, Yael Willner, Ofer Grosskopf, Alex Stein, Gila Canfy Steinitz, and Chaled Kabub. Justice Daphne Barak-Erez will be on vacation that day.
The petitioners’ position, as well as that of the Attorney-General’s Office, is that the government had “changed the rules of the game” in dismissing Baharav-Miara via a ministerial committee after Justice Minister Yariv Levin failed to staff the public-professional committee, the recommendation of which is necessary to move on an appointment.
The committee includes a retired Supreme Court justice as chairman or chairwoman appointed by the sitting chief justice and with the approval of the justice minister; a former justice minister or attorney-general chosen by the government; an MK chosen by the Knesset Constitution, Law, and Justice Committee; a lawyer chosen by the Israel Bar Association; and a legal academic selected by the deans of the law faculties.
No former attorneys-general or justice ministers had agreed to sit on the committee because they disagreed with Levin’s efforts to fire the attorney-general, Levin wrote about two weeks ago in a letter detailing the government’s position.
When the government finally passed the decision to fire her in a unanimous vote, the High Court immediately decided that her dismissal would not take effect until the court could conduct a proper legal review of the decision.
Sohlberg, who authored the decision, ruled that no changes be made to the attorney-general’s position or any of the legal advisers present in ministry offices, and that the government should not announce a replacement for her until the decision goes through the proper checks.
Gov't must still invite A-G to gov't, security cabinet meetings
What this means is that the government must still invite the attorney-general to government and security cabinet meetings. Baharav-Miara was invited to the one scheduled for Thursday.
In a letter to cabinet ministers earlier this week, Baharav-Miara warned that the decision bodes ill for the future of the role, which is unique to Israel in its scope as head of the prosecution and the government’s chief legal interpreter.