The immense gravity of the case weighed heavily on the Supreme Court on Thursday, with justices across the ideological spectrum expressing fears of the new order they could unleash.
The immediate question is whether Trump will face trial in his Jan. 6 criminal case before the 2024 election. But the conservative-led court‘s decision will shape history well beyond November.
„We‘re writing a rule for the ages,“ Justice Neil Gorsuch observed.
“Speech, no matter how unpopular it may be, is the essence of academia. Protest against Zionism in Israel is pure protected speech. … If Jewish students are made uncomfortable by it, f— them!” Cohen, who was raised in an Orthodox Jewish home, told the Village Sun.
“Speech is supposed to make you uncomfortable. This is not lighting candles and kumbaya. … All speech is protected unless the imminent intent is to commit violence — like shouting ‘Fire!’ in a crowded movie theater,” he added. (…)
“I got f—ing suspended from Columbia 50 years ago. I got thrown out of Columbia after a week for anti-war protesting,” he lamented.
“Columbia is fascist,” he said.
(21 February 2023)
Our Declaration of Independence promises that the State of Israel “will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex; it will guarantee freedom of religion, conscience, language, education and culture…”
As of today, those foundational commitments and guarantees are under direct and tangible threat, from the very government charged with upholding them.
Five Israeli human rights organizations in Israel filed on Monday, March 18, a petition calling on High Court to order the far-right government, Prime Minister, Defense Minister, and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories to enable access of all humanitarian aid, equipment and staff to Gaza, especially to the north of the Strip; to significantly increase the volume of aid to Gaza, including by opening land crossings between Gaza and Israel, and to provide for all the needs of the civilian population in keeping with Israel’s obligations as the occupying power.
This in light of the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza and the lethal harm to civilians caused, in part, as a result of Israeli restrictions on access to aid into and throughout the Strip. The petition was filed by Gisha together with HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual, Physicians for Human Rights Israel, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, and Adalah.
Monday’s Supreme Court decision appeared certain to shut down those and other efforts to remove the frontrunner for the GOP nomination from the ballot.
“States may disqualify persons holding or attempting to hold state office,” the court’s unsigned majority opinion read. “But states have no power under the Constitution to enforce Section 3 with respect to federal offices, especially the presidency.”
The Supreme Court ruled unanimously on Monday that former President Donald Trump can remain on Colorado’s presidential primary ballot, reversing an extraordinary state court ruling that had deemed him ineligible to run for the presidency and preventing future attempts by states to remove him from their ballots.
The decision, which came one day ahead of a slate of Super Tuesday primary elections from coast to coast, further cements Trump’s widening path to the Republican presidential nomination.
The papers show that at the start of the war the Foreign Office set up an internal International Humanitarian Law assessment process.
On 10 November it judged: “the volume of strikes, total death toll, as well as proportion of those who are children raise serious concerns”. 2/12
It also said: „the government’s current inability to come to a clear assessment on Israel’s record of compliance with International Humanitarian Law poses significant policy risks”.
But look at what Foreign Office minister Andrew Mitchell said to me just 4 days later… 3/12
In Parliament on 14 November, I asked Mitchell if British-made weapons had been used in violation of international law in Gaza.
He replied reassuring me of Israel‘s commitment to international law, even though just 4 days earlier his department registered serious concerns. 4/12
Mitchell said: „The member will know that the President of Israel has made it clear that his country will abide by International Humanitarian Law“.
These court papers reveal that his own department, the UK Foreign Office, doubted the Israeli President‘s words.
The Export Control Joint Unit – a cross-departmental body that oversees UK‘s export controls and licensing for military and dual-use items – told Cameron on 8 December that he had three options when it came to advising whether export licenses for sales to Israel should be approved.
He could either not suspend them, but keep them under careful review; suspend where it was assessed items might be used to carry out Israeli military options in the conflict in Gaza; or suspend all licenses.
Cameron decided on 12 December that he was satisfied Israel was committed to complying with international humanitarian law, according to the filing.
The petition was filed after the police refused on Tuesday to approve the protest, for the third time.
The petition states that the police‘s refusal to approve the protest „joins the systematic oppression of protests, even small demonstrations, that criticise the combat, its results, and demand a diplomatic solution“.
Underscoring the urgency, arguments will be held on Feb. 8, during what is normally a nearly monthlong winter break for the justices. The compressed timeframe could allow the court to produce a decision before Super Tuesday on March 5, when the largest number of delegates are up for grabs in a single day, including in Colorado.
The high court’s decision to hear the case puts the nine justices squarely in the middle of the 2024 election as voting starts in the early primary contests and represents the court’s most significant involvement in a presidential race since its highly consequential decision 23 years ago in Bush v. Gore.
Die von der Regierung seit ihrer Vereidigung vor einem Jahr massiv vorangetriebene Justizreform hatte die israelische Gesellschaft tief gespalten. Über Monate gingen immer wieder Hunderttausende von Menschen auf die Straße, um dagegen zu protestieren – sie sahen im Vorgehen der Regierung eine Gefahr für Israels Demokratie.
Netanyahus Regierung argumentierte dagegen, das Gericht sei in Israel zu mächtig, man wolle lediglich ein Gleichgewicht wiederherstellen.
The reasonableness law, an amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary, prohibits courts, including the High Court, from reviewing government and ministerial decisions using the „reasonableness“ standard. This standard permits the court to annul decisions based on substantive issues with the considerations behind them.
It was passed last year amid furious protests that saw hundreds of thousands Israelis take to rallies in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and elsewhere across Israel.
– Twelve out of 15 Supreme Court judges ruled that the court has the authority to conduct judicial oversight on basic laws and intervene in extreme cases when the Knesset oversteps its legislative authority.
– The law was the first piece of legislation of Netanyahu‘s judicial overhaul — a plan that destabilized Israel‘s economy, military and foreign relations.
The Supreme Court struck down the law in an 8-7 vote.
Twelve of the 15 justices agree the court does have the authority to strike down Basic Laws.
(38 min ago)
Hebrew media outlets report that the High Court of Justice will publish its ruling on the government’s “reasonableness law” this evening and that it will strike down the controversial legislation, which is an amendment to Basic Law: The Judiciary.
This would be the first time the court strikes down any aspect of one of Israel’s Basic Laws, which have quasi-constitutional status.
Lawmakers from the Shas coalition party are reportedly seeking to advance a bill that would temporarily extend the time in which High Court justices can publish rulings on petitions, allowing the bench to postpone a decision that is widely expected to strike down a piece of the government’s judicial overhaul.
In an unprecedented leak, a draft ruling published last week previewed the court’s intention to strike down, by an 8-7 vote, a law limiting the court’s ability to reverse government and ministerial decisions based on the doctrine of reasonableness.
“The judiciary views very severely the leak of parts of draft rulings that have not been completed,” acting Supreme Court President Uzi Vogelman said of the leak. “The attempt to influence pending proceedings and to harm public trust in the judiciary and its dedicated judges and employees will not succeed.” The final ruling is expected to arrive midway through January.
The report drew immediate, heated reactions, with coalition members chastising the expected decision and casting it as undermining the national unity being displayed during the ongoing war against Hamas. The group that petitioned for the law to be nullified claimed the leak was an attempt to intimidate the justices and push them to change their ruling and not void the legislation.
The leaked draft revealed an apparent 8-7 split among the 15-justice panel, indicating eight justices in favor of annulling the law and seven against
The justices who reportedly support the nullification are: former president Esther Hayut, current care-taker president Uzi Vogelman, Isaac Amit, Anat Baron, Ofer Grosskopf, Chaled Kabub, Daphne Barak-Erez and Ruth Ronnen.
The opponents are reported to be Noam Sohlberg, Yechiel Meir Kasher, Yosef Elron, Alex Stein, Yael Willner, David Mintz and Gila Canfy Steinitz.
Each judge will now read the opinions of the other justices before a final decision is reached. There is a chance, though slim, that the result will be different if a justice changes his or her mind after reading the other verdicts, Channel 12 reported.
GENEVA (15 December 2023) – UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk today hailed Chile’s Supreme Court judgement on Operation Condor – a notorious campaign coordinated among South America’s dictatorships in the 70s and 80s to persecute political opponents and dissidents – as a major step towards accountability for thousands of victims.
The former dictatorships in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay implemented Operation Condor to search for, persecute, torture, summarily kill and forcibly disappear people perceived as dissidents across the region. They used a myriad of tactics to eliminate them, including throwing people out of aeroplanes and helicopters.
On 14 December, in a unanimous ruling, Chile’s Supreme Court confirmed the convictions of 22 agents of the dissolved Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) for the kidnappings and qualified homicides of some victims of the Operation Condor, and ordered reparation measures.
(November 11, 2023)
We told the police that we are going to have this protest, that it’s going to be only leadership, that it’s not going to be a massive demonstration or something like this. The next day, when Barakeh was heading to Nazareth, they arrested him.
How do you interpret these crackdowns? Is this an attempt by the Israeli government to effectively criminalize expressions of Palestinian identity and solidarity?
Not only the Palestinian identity. I think that whatever they couldn’t pass through the judicial overhaul, they are passing now under the cover of the war.
(14.11.2023)
Members of the Judicial Appointments Committee are looking into the option of initiating a motion to elect Justice Isaac Amit as the president of the Supreme Court, despite the opposition of Justice Minister Yariv Levin.
(November 12, 2023)
(November 5, 2023)
In a letter from his lawyer to the Supreme Court, Justice Minister Yariv Levin pledged to convene the Judicial Appointments Committee within 15 days. The court had been scheduled to hear challenges to his hold-ups, which have resulted in backlogs in filling vacated bench positions.
„The justice minister believes there is no justification for being preoccupied with disputes during a war,“ the letter said.
(23. Juli 2014)
Je mehr und je länger die Praxis der ausführenden Funktionäre / Amtsinhaber und ihrer nach eigenem Ermessen interpretierten Begriffe und Rechtsbegriffe anhält und von der Gesellschaft akzeptiert wird, verändert diese merklich oder unmerklich ihre eigene Auffassung dieser Begriffe bzw Rechtsbegriffe und passt sie der Rechtsauffassung der Ausführenden bzw Amtsträger und Funktionäre an.
Die Gesellschaft akzeptiert also nach und nach eine Umdeutung der (rechtlichen) Standards durch diejenigen, die sie lediglich ausführen müssen oder sogar selbst beschlossen haben, aber nicht versucht haben sie in aller Öffentlichkeit zu verändern.
Nun aber kann der neue Standard, den man durch veränderte Praxis und eigene Auslegung von Begriffen, Rechtsbegriffen und Recht in der Gesellschaft verankert hat, in neue Gesetze gegossen werden.
Die Interpretation der Norm – die bewusst, gezielt und unauffällig eingesetzt auch eine faktisch unbegrenzte Abweichung von der Norm, einen Bruch beinhalten kann – ist so die Norm selbst geworden. Eigentlich Illegales wird legal. Oder umgekehrt. (…)
Erfolgen diese Prozesse in Absprache und / oder auf Befehl der höchsten staatlichen Ebenen, in Exekutive, Legislative oder Judikative, gar allen zusammen, im Geheimen, in Absprache mit einer ausländischen Macht, oder gleich mit mehreren, nennt man so etwas Hochverrat und einen organisierten Staatsstreich.
The Tuesday night protest in the Jerusalem suburb of Mevaseret Zion was made up largely of former defense officials, including senior members of the National Security Council, which Hanegbi now leads.
While protests outside the homes of lawmakers have become the norm over the past year, the decision to target Hanegbi, who is no longer a politician appeared relatively rare — as was his willingness to sit with those demonstrating against him.
Generally, there are preambles to the constitution and this preamble has been called by our Supreme Court the “conscience of the constitution”. Preamble’s Part 3 Fundamental Rights, Part 4 Directive Principles of State Policy, which are not enforceable by the court but are nonetheless binding, they are all part of the conscience of the constitution (…)
You believe that there is the duty to interpret the constitution in the context of the time and in the context of the issues of the day.
Oh absolutely, absolutely! There has to be! (…)
In fact, interpretations keep changing, people keep adding to existing questions and revising new meanings.
Absolutely! Courts as you know go by precedent, so what five judges say today, seven judges can say tomorrow or have nine judges say the contrary to that, two years later.
This is what makes the constitution a living, dynamic object.
Absolutely!
(15 Feb 2011)
Since the fall of Baghdad, Curveball‘s identity had been sought throughout Iraq and Europe. He was finally outed in late 2007 as the main source for Powell‘s speech, but has tried to keep a low profile ever since, refusing — under the orders of the BND — the approaches of the few reporters who had tracked him downto Karlsruhe.
The only other time Curveball has agreed to be interviewed was in late 2007, when he told CNN that he had been set up as a fall guy by the BND and had never breathed a word to them about WMD.
(28.8.2011)
Diese bis heute verbreitete Darstellung ist unangenehm für die Bundesrepublik. Deutschland steht da als ein Land, das ein Doppelspiel betrieben hat: nach außen den Pazifisten geben – und hintenherum über seinen Geheimdienst einen entscheidenden Grund für die militärische Intervention liefern. Der Bundesnachrichtendienst nahm die Vorwürfe schweigend hin.
The plaintiffs in the case, led by the states of Missouri and Louisiana, eminent doctors, and others alleged that under guise of combating „mis-, dis-, and mal-information,“ the Biden White House and nearly a dozen federal agencies have, alongside private-sector cutouts, cajoled and colluded with Big Tech platforms to silence millions of Americans. The topics social media platforms have censored at the government‘s direction, measuring likely hundreds of millions of posts, range from the Hunter Biden laptop story, to matters of election integrity, to virtually every aspect of the coronavirus pandemic.
In addition to the precedent of having the entire 15-strong Supreme Court bench convened for the first time in the nation’s history, the extensive, live coverage was itself somewhat historic: TV channels are in the ratings business, and evidently recognized that the sight of a room full of largely drearily dressed middle-aged people discussing complex principles of law, without even the prospect of a definitive conclusion in the near future, would nonetheless prove a more riveting must-watch for a substantial proportion of the Israeli public than the usual non-primetime daily fare of singing, dancing and dating shows, cooking contests and sitcoms.
A ruling may not come for months.
(fee required content)
Tuesday’s hearing — positioned as part of an unprecedented clash between the court and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government over its planned overhaul of the judiciary — started at 9 a.m. and will likely stretch well into the afternoon.
Although the High Court has heard petitions against Basic Laws before, it has never heard a case against a law specifically designed to limit the High Court’s own powers, and the powers of the judiciary more broadly, nor has it done so amid such internal political turmoil over the balance of power between the branches of government.
Because of the extremely sensitive nature of the case and the highly explosive impact the court’s ruling may have, the entire bench of 15 High Court justices will hear the petitions, a judicial panel unprecedented in size in Israel’s history.
In its brief, the government argues that the court lacks statutory authority to annul Israel’s quasi-constitutional Basic Laws, and therefore any such verdict would be based on unlegislated and unclear “basic principles.”
“All government institutions may argue that they have the right to determine what these principles mean. It is a short path from here to anarchy,” the brief said
An unprecedented full 15-justice panel of the High Court is slated to hear the petitions against the law on September 12. A variety of government ministers and other figures have warned of the potential for chaos if the court strikes down the law passed by the Knesset to curb the court’s authority, setting up a potential constitutional crisis.
Demonstrations are to be held at dozens of locations across the country. The Tel Aviv protest begins with a march from Habima Square to the central rally at Kaplan Street at 8 p.m.
Israel‘s Knesset Speaker Amir Ohana warned Supreme Court justices on Wednesday that the parliament „will not acquiesce to its trampling,“ less than a week before the court is set to hear petitions against a key law in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s judicial coup.
“Israel is democratic, and in a democracy, the sovereign is the people. In a democratic state, the justice system respects the sovereign, the people and its elected officials, and this respect is mutual. There is no debate, and there cannot be one, over the question of whether the Knesset has authorized the court to nullify Basic Laws,” he says, arguing that the court possesses no such power.
The compromise, as reported, aimed to freeze all further judicial overhaul legislation in return for granting the coalition more power on the Judicial Selection Committee in the form of veto power on the selection of the Supreme Court president and lower court judges.
But today’s report says Netanyahu was adamant that any freeze still allow a potential “override clause” to be legislated with a regular majority, in the event that the High Court of Justice nullifies the government’s law shielding the premier from being ordered by courts or the attorney general to step down.
Just a month before she retires, Supreme Court President Esther Hayut will conduct the battle of her life, and the decision she presides over will shape the life of the entire nation.
The announcement of the government’s narrowing of the Reasonableness Standard was received by Hayut in Germany, where she was visiting along with a group of Supreme Court justices. They cut short the visit and returned to Israel.
(24.12.2021)
Beim Antrittsbesuch des neuen deutschen Bundeskanzlers Olaf Scholz (SPD) in Warschau hatte Polens Ministerpräsident Mateusz Morawiecki vergangene Woche Kritik an dem im Koalitionsvertrag der Ampel-Parteien vereinbarten Ziel geübt, die EU zu einem „föderalen Bundesstaat“ weiterzuentwickeln: In polnischen Ohren klinge diese Vision nach „bürokratischem Zentralismus – das ist eine Utopie und gefährlich“.
(22.08.2023)
„Beim BND-Gesetz werden die besonderen demokratischen Rechte von Journalistinnen und Journalisten nicht ausreichend geschützt. Daher wurde das Gesetz in der Vergangenheit wiederholt vom Bundesverfassungsgericht als mangelhaft zurückgewiesen und dem Gesetzgeber Nachbesserungen zum Schutz der Grundrechte aufgetragen.
Ganz offensichtlich handelt es sich beim Gesetz über den BND also um eine komplexe Materie. Nachdem sich das Bundeskanzleramt für seine Überarbeitung des Gesetzes zwölf Monate Zeit ließ, werden den Betroffenen und ihren Verbänden nun 24 Stunden zur Stellungnahme eingeräumt – eine irrwitzige Frist. Die Einhaltung von Pressefreiheit und Grundrechten scheint zur Nebensache degradiert. Die Deutsche Journalistinnen- und Journalisten-Union (dju) in ver.di fordert das Bundeskanzleramt auf, die Verbände angemessen zu beteiligen und die Frist zur Stellungnahme anzupassen.“
ROG und GFF hatten schon im Jahr 2017 eine Verfassungsbeschwerde erhoben, die sich gegen die nach den Snowden-Enthüllungen eingeführten Rechtsgrundlagen für die strategische Auslandsüberwachung des Geheimdienstes richtete. Im Mai 2020 erklärte das Bundesverfassungsgericht das BND-Gesetz für verfassungswidrig, weil es gegen die Pressefreiheit (Art. 5 Abs. 1 Satz 2 GG) und gegen das Fernmeldegeheimnis (Art. 10 Abs. 1) verstieß. Daraufhin reformierte die Große Koalition das BND-Gesetz.
Trotz unzähliger Hinweise von Sachverständigen im Gesetzgebungsverfahren kam nach Ansicht der Nichtregierungsorganisationen ein Gesetz heraus, das etliche Maßgaben des Bundesverfassungsgerichts verletze und jenseits dieser Maßgaben weitere verfassungswidrige Befugnisse eingeführt habe. Ende 2022 erhoben ROG und GFF daher erneut Verfassungsbeschwerde gegen das aktuelle BND-Gesetz.