Complaints against judges rose sharply in 2025, according to an annual report by the Judicial Complaints Commissioner’s office published on Monday, but the document’s most consequential finding is less about dramatic misconduct claims than about a system still struggling with delay, backlog, and courtroom management.
The report was formally submitted to Justice Minister Yariv Levin and Supreme Court President Isaac Amit earlier on Monday. It says that 1,100 complaints were filed in 2025, up from 770 in 2024. But it also makes clear that the numbers reflect an unusual period: the office operated for more than a year without a sitting commissioner, leaving roughly 900 open complaints piled up before retired judge Asher Kula entered the post in July 2025.
The average handling time for complaints examined on the merits stood at 228 days, and 474 complaints were still unresolved by the end of the year.
That context matters. The report is formally a 2024-2025 document, but not a standard two-year review. Instead, it covers the first half of 2024 under former commissioner Uri Shoham and the second half of 2025 under Kula, following a prolonged vacancy that became part of the broader political and legal struggle over who oversees complaints against judges.
Even so, the report does not depict a system awash in proven misconduct. Of 1,067 complaints that were actually examined, only 24 were found justified, 47 ended with a remark to a judge, and 14 ended with a finding of a systemic flaw. Put differently, 92% of the complaints examined were either rejected or halted after review.
That is a reminder both of how much public frustration reaches the commissioner and of how narrow the lane is between bad outcomes for litigants and conduct that actually warrants intervention.
Still, the document’s most telling breakdown is what those justified complaints were about. Nineteen of the 24 justified complaints - 79% - concerned the management of proceedings, including prolonged delays. Only three involved breaches of natural justice, and two involved improper conduct.
In other words, the central problem identified by the ombudsman was not ideological misconduct or ethical scandal, but the slower, more grinding failures that shape how litigants actually experience the courts.
Examples from the report
That pattern runs through the examples highlighted in the report. One small-claims ruling was issued roughly a year after the last hearing, with the commissioner calling that outcome unacceptable. Another complaint described a person seeking an urgent anti-harassment order on a Saturday night before Passover eve, only to be sent back and forth for hours before receiving relief.
In a separate case, the commissioner faulted what he described as excessive rigidity after a court imposed costs on a litigant whose witness, a commanding officer, was called into urgent operational activity in Syria on the eve of the hearing.
The institutional geography of the complaints is also revealing. Magistrate’s courts drew by far the largest share of complaints, with 448 filed in 2025, followed by family courts with 239, district courts with 135, and the Supreme Court with 64.
The bulk of the justified findings also came in the lower courts, especially at the magistrates' level. That is hardly surprising: these are the courts where the public most often encounters the judiciary directly, and where overloaded calendars, repeated postponements, and day-to-day courtroom friction are most likely to generate complaints.
The report also devotes substantial attention to tone and conduct. Among the examples it cites are a judge who told a lawyer testifying in his courtroom, “What do you think, that everyone in Beersheba is stupid?”; a judge joining in a compliment about a lawyer’s appearance; and decisions stressing that judges should avoid personal comments about litigants and their families.
Another complaint addressed wording in a ruling that referred to a terrorist as “the deceased,” with the commissioner saying the phrasing created discomfort and suggested one-sided sensitivity toward the terrorist’s family without sufficient sensitivity toward the victim’s relatives.
At the same time, Kula’s report makes clear that he sees the office not merely as a disciplinary mechanism but as a tool for restoring trust.
In the introduction, he explicitly lists the themes he chose to emphasize going forward: handling cases within a reasonable time, stricter attention to conflicts of interest and the appearance of justice, improper judicial remarks, abusive complaints, and renewed scrutiny of complaints brought by public actors who were not directly affected by the conduct in question.
That is both a policy statement and a signal about where the commissioner believes public confidence is most fragile.
The report is also notable for the political and institutional backdrop it foregrounds. Kula writes that two of the term’s most important principled decisions were those concerning Judge Yoram Broza, a senior judge at the Beersheba Magistrate’s Court, and Amit, both of which received intense public attention.
In the Broza case, Kula upheld the complaint and wrote that the judge’s comments harmed public confidence, while stopping short of recommending an end to his service as a judge and instead saying his continued tenure as deputy president should be examined.
In the Amit matter, Kula rejected most of the complaints, including claims tied to construction and conflict-of-interest allegations, but still stressed that fuller disclosure would have prevented at least some of the controversy.
That pairing is important. It suggests Kula wants the office to project two messages at once: that it is willing to act in politically charged cases when judges’ conduct crosses the line, and that it will not become a vehicle for every public campaign against sitting judges.
That balance has been central to the public debate over the office itself, especially after a year in which Kula’s appointment process became entangled in the larger dispute over the judiciary.
The office carries real statutory weight, including the ability to recommend disciplinary proceedings and, in extreme cases, dismissal. Precisely because it has those powers, every move it makes is now read not only as oversight, but also as a test of the judiciary’s independence and the political system’s reach into it.
In that sense, the report’s rise in complaints is only part of the story. The deeper message is that the commissioner sees the judiciary’s pressure points in the ordinary mechanics of justice: how long litigants wait, how judges speak, whether disclosure is full and early, and whether courts remain responsive in moments of urgency, war, and overload.
For all the drama surrounding the office, the report ultimately argues that public trust in the courts is often won or lost in the less glamorous places - the delayed ruling, the sharp remark, the unexplained postponement, the hearing that should have been handled differently.