Representatives for the Judicial Selection Committee should be chosen in June and the coalition should remove all judicial reform bills from the Knesset table, opposition leader Yair Lapid said on Saturday night as protests against the legal overhaul continued for the twentieth week.
Lapid said that the Knesset should “immediately convene the committee and start working according to the rules that have been used all these years.”
The Yesh Atid leader said that the selections for the panel should include the seat that had traditionally been reserved for the opposition. On May 15 coalition members warned that the opposition would not be guaranteed a seat on the committee, as enshrined in the judicial selection committee bill, if no agreement was reached.
The appointment deadline was extended
In March, the Knesset had voted to change bylaws and delay appointing representatives to the panel. The original deadline had been March 15, but the government extended it to June 15.
Lapid said that without the appointment of the representatives, there was no point in talks, and the opposition wouldn’t be part of a “fraud.”
WILL THE talks under the auspices of President Isaac Herzog allow top opposition figures Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz to reach an agreement with the government coalition on judicial reform? (credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)Lapid also renewed calls for the government to backtrack the legislative process which had been halted right as the judicial selection committee bill had been sent to the Knesset.
“The government needs to remove all laws from the Knesset table and they need to understand there will be no situation in which the coalition chooses judges for itself,” Lapid wrote on Twitter. “It’s not going to happen. Not on our watch.”
Lapid said that the protests, which unfolded immediately after the reform principles were announced in the first week of January, had succeeded in stopping the coalition from passing legislation.
Netanyahu calls for unity
On Friday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for national unity in a Jerusalem Day Speech.
He noted that the Israeli flag was seeing a renaissance in importance, and had been selling out, not just for Jerusalem Day celebrations but also due to anti-reform protests — though Netanyahu noted that the claims that Israel was descending into a dictatorship were baseless.
“We are brothers,” said Netanyahu. “Without giving up on our important principles, we will always look for discussion and agreement, and my hope is that we’ll arrive at the day that all the flags will become one flowing river, all of us together.”
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