The Forum cautions that the bill concerning the Office of the Attorney General, which was approved for its first reading by the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, poses a grave threat to the rule of law. The proposal opens the door to arbitrariness, discrimination, and corruption at all levels of the executive branch. It would transform the legal counsel to the government into a mechanism serving the political interests of the governing coalition and would, in practice, exempt the government from being bound by the law. The proposal may also lead to the politicization of the public prosecution system, which is of particular concern. Under the guise of a structural reform (“splitting” the functions of the Attorney General), the bill is in fact designed to dismantle the Office of the Attorney General as a professional institution whose purpose is to ensure the rule of law within the executive branch. The Forum calls upon the Knesset to reject the proposal.
According to the bill, the government would be free to appoint and dismiss the Attorney General at will. The proposal ties the Attorney General’s professional fate to the political fate of the government. Moreover, under the bill, the government would be permitted to disregard the professional legal opinion of the Attorney General regarding the law and to exempt any other governmental body from being bound by the legal interpretation provided by government legal advisers. This would effectively release the government, its ministries, and its agencies from the obligation to comply with the law whenever it sees fit, in all types of decisions and matters—policy making and implementation, appointments and tenders, deprivation of rights, and allocation of resources. The institution bound by the law would become the institution that defines the law. The politicization of the Attorney General’s office would also affect hundreds of statutory provisions that, over the years, have granted it powers to protect the public interest from political arbitrariness or the abuse of excessive power by private actors. In this way, it would endanger the rights of all citizens in numerous contexts.
In addition, the exceptional rules included in the proposal regarding the investigation and prosecution of ministers and members of Knesset would substantially limit the possibility of holding them criminally accountable. While there is justification for special oversight mechanisms concerning the prosecution of judges, due to the need to safeguard judicial independence, the same does not apply to political officeholders, many of whom already enjoy special protections under parliamentary immunity laws. The practical effect of this arrangement would be, at best, delay and, at worst, obstruction of essential criminal proceedings involving corruption and maladministration.
Unless an explicit provision is included in the law regarding its effective date of application, the bill could be implemented immediately upon enactment. Consequently, it would enable the government to dismiss the current Attorney General in order to bring about the cancellation of the Prime Minister’s criminal trial.
Finally, the process by which the proposal was approved for its first reading in the Knesset committee suffered from serious procedural defects. The text of the proposal was repeatedly altered in accordance with suggestions made by the committee chair, including substantial changes introduced only days before the committee vote, without any meaningful discussion. The bill submitted to the Knesset for its first reading is not even complete: its appendices, which are supposed to contain critical provisions regarding the allocation of powers between the Attorney General’s office and the Public Prosecution, have not yet been drafted. Meanwhile, the residual authority to determine who will exercise powers that have not been allocated is proposed to be vested in the Minister of Justice.
The bill concerning the Office of the Attorney General, which presents itself as a proposal for a technical institutional reform, is in fact a dramatic move to dismantle the rule of law within the executive branch. The Forum calls upon the Knesset to reject it outright.