Critics of the right-wing Israeli government’s new judicial law fear it could threaten a key state watchdog: the attorney general, Gali Baharav-Miara.
As Israel’s chief prosecutor, Ms. Baharav-Miara is also charged with overseeing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s corruption trial. Mr. Netanyahu denies any wrongdoing and says he is the victim of “a witch hunt” by state prosecutors.
The new law, which curbs the courts’ ability to overrule government decisions based on whether judges think they are “reasonable,” could allow Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition to eliminate Ms. Baharav-Miara with greater ease, legal experts said. The government would have to meet less challenging standards in order to withstand judicial review, they said.
“If the attorney general were summarily dismissed, at least until yesterday, the primary grounds for challenging that would be that it was grossly unreasonable,” said Joshua Schoffman, a former Israeli deputy attorney general. He said the justices could still intervene in her dismissal if they found there was a conflict of interests, for example.
The attorney general in Israel plays a somewhat different role than in the United States. Ms. Baharav-Miara, the first woman to serve in the role in Israel, is an independent legal adviser, not a political appointee. She represents the government but is also tasked with protecting the public interest and serves as a check on state overreach.
The threat of dismissal could have a chilling effect on the independence of all the government’s legal advisers, including Ms. Baharav-Miara, said Guy Lurie, a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group.
In recent months, Ms. Baharav-Miara has fiercely criticized Mr. Netanyahu’s broader plans to overhaul the judiciary. She has also blocked the dismissal of a police commander by Itamar Ben-Gvir, an ultranationalist minister, and sought to prevent Mr. Netanyahu’s involvement in the judicial dispute in Parliament because of his ongoing corruption trial, which she said created a conflict of interest.
Mr. Netanyahu’s allies call Ms. Baharav-Miara a bureaucrat forcing her will on the country’s elected leaders. Opponents of the judicial overhaul see Ms. Baharav-Miara as standing up for democracy and the rule of law in the face of a governing coalition stacked with hard-line nationalists and religious conservatives.
Mr. Netanyahu and his Likud party have repeatedly denied that they intend to fire Ms. Baharav-Miara. But that hasn’t stopped his allies — and even some senior Likud members — from calling for her dismissal.
In an interview last month with Israel’s Channel 12, Likud minister Shlomo Karhi said the attorney general should be removed from her post immediately, saying that the only thing stopping the move “is this whole matter of the reasonableness doctrine.”
Moshe Lador, a former top prosecutor, said the Supreme Court still had other tools to overturn efforts to fire Ms. Baharav-Miara. But the broader judicial overhaul clearly aims to weaken or even replace the attorney general, he said, which could benefit Mr. Netanyahu in his corruption trial.