When a group of Australian judges is so exercised by reasonable attempts to curb Israel’s activist court, it is a sign of the activist preferences of some of our own judges.
In April, the Australian Judicial Officers Association issued a statement publicly condemning the judicial reforms proposed by the Netanyahu government.
“The proposed laws risk undermining the rule of law and jeopardising the independence of the judiciary as well as potentially impacting upon human rights … (and) acutely raises the prospect of the erasure of the democracy,” the judges’ body said.
It’s hard to think of a more ill-informed and overblown public statement by a body representing more than half of the country’s judges. Worse, this public intervention into a highly political debate in Israel has placed hundreds of Australian judges in the unfortunate position of having a perceived bias against people who support the judicial reforms. Not to mention suggesting to Australians that our own judges hanker for the kind of judicial activism that defines Israel’s highest court.
For many decades now, Israel has been in the throes of a vigorous debate about the relationship between the Knesset, a democratic body that represents the will of the people, and the power of Israel’s Supreme Court.
For the first 40 years of its existence the court was a highly respected, if occasionally activist, one. Its judgments were scholarly, sombre and legal, as one should expect from the nation’s most senior judges. Israel does not have a written constitution. Instead it has a set of Basic Laws. These were passed by the Knesset with no special majority, without any referendum, with no hint from politicians of them being constitutional in nature, so they have no higher status than any other legislation passed by the Knesset.
Read the opinion piece by Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian.