High Court delays ruling whether Netanyahu can be PM
Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit has made it clear that he is not interested in personally being the hand that forces Netanyahu out of office.
By YONAH JEREMY BOBIsraeli High Court hearing on whether Netanyahu can form next government despite indictment he faces. (December 31, 2019)(photo credit: YONAH JEREMY BOB)
A hearing was held before the High Court of Justice on Tuesday morning to discuss a petition asking that the court rule that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under indictment on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust, cannot form the next government. The hearing ended with no immediate decision.Although the High Court announced that it would decide on the matter at a later point, the overall feel of the justices’ questions to the lawyers was that they would very much prefer to stay out of the issue.Chief Justice Esther Hayut, her deputy Justice Hanan Melcer and Justice Uzi Vogelman conducted the hearing.Around 70 hi-tech officials have requested that the court rule on Netanyahu's eligibility to form a government before the upcoming March 2 election, mainly due to the charge of bribery which he faces in Case 4000 also known as the "Bezeq-Walla Affair."During the hearing, lawyers for the petitioners said that the High Court had set a clear precedent when it forced Arye Deri to resign as minister upon indictment for bribery 20 years ago, and the precedent demands that the court do the same in Netanyahu's case.All three justices hinted that making a ruling now is premature, and will only become relevant once Netanyahu's candidacy to form a government is presented to President Reuven Rivlin following the upcoming election in March.They hammered the petitioners’ lawyer Daphna Holech-Lechner to give them an example where the courts had been asked to make a pre-election declaratory statement about the status of a candidate before there was an explicit legal obligation to do so.Hayut even pointed out that in a prior High Court case, when it had fired three mayors who were indicted for corruption, the court still did not prevent those mayors from running for reelection since they had not yet been convicted and no law blocked them from running.Holech-Lechner stood her guns on the idea that “irreversible damage” will be done to the will of the voters if some vote for Netanyahu now, thinking he is eligible to form a government, only to find out post-election that he is not eligible.She also pleaded with the judges to draw a line by making clear that the country still has norms against corruption and stands for the rule of law, and is not merely governed by “the will of the nation” of supporters of Netanyahu.
When Likud lawyer Avi Halevi emphasized to the court that it must respect “the will of the nation” to allow Netanyahu to continue to be prime minister, Vogelman interjected that, “The Likud is not the nation [does not represent the whole nation.]”The justices pressed Halevi and also Netanyahu’s lawyer, Michael Ravilo, to explain how they would be able to fix the situation post-election, if in fact Netanyahu was elected but was also legally disqualified.Ravilo did not deal with this scenario, but said that there could never be a basis to disqualify Netanyahu pre- or post-election, or at any point before he is convicted and exhausts all of his appeals.Further, Ravilo said that since the Basic Law explicitly sets the deadline as the point when a prime minister can be forced to resign, all of the clever legal interpretations of judge-made law by Holech-Lechner were irrelevant.The state’s lawyer said that the issue was still theoretical and warned the court against jumping into a toxic political election season.Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit had made it clear before the hearing that he is not interested in personally being the hand that forces Netanyahu out of office.He has made legal arguments protecting Netanyahu from being forced out on multiple legal grounds of attack, while postponing indefinitely analyzing whether the prime minister can form a new government now that he has been indicted for bribery.Mandelblit has ruled that the issue can be kicked down the road because it is only theoretical.Until Netanyahu is actually in a position in which he has the support of 61 MKs – something that may never happen, and in any event is more than three months away given that a third election is imminent – Mandelblit said that there is no reason to rule on it.
