Bill to weaken Israel Bar Association passes preliminary Knesset vote

The coalition passed a preliminary vote on a controversial bill aimed at weakening the Israel Bar Association (IBA) on Wednesday.

The bill, authored by MK Hanoch Milwidsky (Likud), gives the justice minister the authority to set the amount of the annual membership fee instead of IBA’s national council, which currently enjoys that authority.

Milwidsky, along with Justice Minister MK Yariv Levin (Likud), argued that the IBA should not have the power to set a fee that lawyers were forced to pay to practice their profession.

According to the law’s explanatory section, this will solve the problem of the “lack of transparency of a body whose budget is approximately NIS 100 million.”

However, several MKs from the opposition argued that the bill’s real purpose was to serve as a threat against the IBA. It is an attempt to force the IBA’s two members in the Judicial Selection Committee to support Levin’s candidate for an upcoming vote to appoint the next High Court chief justice, they said.

MK Orit-Farkash Hacohen said that the head of the IBA had told her explicitly that he had received messages that if its representatives caved to Levin’s demands, the threatening law would “go away.”

The bill proposal was a watered-down version of a bill proposed by Milwidsky in June that would have made the IBA completely voluntary, giving a government-appointed committee the power to determine who could or could not practice law instead.

Similar bill proposals came up during the government’s controversial judicial reforms in 2023.

Judicial Selection Committee

The makeup of the Judicial Selection Committee has been a major bone of contention between the government, the opposition, and the judicial system, and one of the central bills in the judicial reforms was to alter its makeup such that the government could have indirect control over judicial appointments.

Another controversy is the mechanism for appointing the chief justice. Traditionally, the position is filled by the longest-serving member of the bench, who is currently the liberal interim chief justice Yitzhak Amit.

Levin, however, prefers the conservative judge Yosef Elron and has argued that the “seniority” method is not statutory and should not always apply.

The chief justice vote requires a regular majority within the nine-member selection. The committee includes three judges and two members of the IBA, and, along with the opposition representative MK Karine Elharrar, is expected to appoint Amit.

However, an IBA vote alongside the coalition’s three representatives would give Levin a majority.

Levin has refrained from convening the committee to appoint the next permanent chief justice or to fill the three current vacancies on the bench.

The High Court ruled in September that Levin did not have the authority to avoid electing a chief justice and gave him 14 days to announce the candidates and an additional 45 days to convene the committee.

Levin responded by naming all of the judges as candidates and encouraging the public to file complaints against them. All of the judges besides Amit and Elron removed their candidacy. Levin announced on November 5 that the committee would convene on November 28, but it is not clear if a vote to appoint the chief justice will be held.

In the meantime, Otzma Yehudit MK Yitzhak Kreuzer, who is a member of the committee, proposed a bill that would require a majority of 7-2 in the chief justice vote, similar to the majority required for new appointments to the High Court.

This bill would give the coalition’s three members veto power in the chief justice vote. However, Kreuzer’s bill is unlikely to pass by the committee meeting on November 28.

IBA chairman Amit Becher wrote on X/Twitter that the IBA bill proposal was an “extortion attempt” and a “shameless mafioso demand” by Levin, who “has lost his brakes and, during wartime, continues to harm the budget of the judicial system.”

Becher added that Levin could “forget about it,” and that the IBA will continue “defending the independence of the judicial system and the judicial selections.”