BICOM

Dorit Beinish, President of Israel’s Supreme Court, yesterday harshly criticised what she referred to as an ‘incitement campaign’ against the Supreme Court. In a speech to the annual conference of the Israeli Association of Public Law, at a hotel near the Dead Sea, Beinish warned against attempts to diminish the court’s ability to ‘protect the democratic values of the state.’ She did, however, note the role of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in blocking a number of recent bills intended to change the face of the Supreme Court, but said that an ‘on going trend’ against the Court was under way.

Since the Knesset opened for its winter session, a number of controversial legal initiatives have passed before it, which aim to limit the Supreme Court and increase political influence on it. These include the ‘Grunis Law’ that would give the Knesset’s Constitution Committee the right to vet Supreme Court candidates, which passed a first reading earlier this month.

MK Zeev Elkin, who has pioneered a number of the bills in the Knesset to which Beinish was referring, said that the Supreme Court President’s words were an example of ‘wild incitement’ against the Knesset.