Shaked: Likud is responsible for judicial activism
Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked blamed her predecessors from the Likud for the rise of judicial activism and for not doing anything to stem its growth, at the Hebrew-language conference on Wednesday in Tel Aviv that was sponsored by The Jerusalem Post Group, parent company of Maariv newspaper and the Post.
“Dan Meridor from the Likud led the constitutional revolution,” she said, referring to the passage of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty, and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation, which the Supreme Court has used to strike down laws passed by the Knesset.
“Until the 1990s, we were a glorious democracy without the ability of the court to cancel laws,” she said.
Shaked made similar comments to the Post last week, adding: “Until I was justice minister, [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu was proud of stopping laws to change the judiciary.”
During her term, Shaked said, the Kulanu Party blocked any changes to Basic Laws, so she had to find other ways to shape the judiciary to be more conservative.
“I invested most of my efforts to appoint judges with a more conservative and nationalist worldview,” she said. “Judges aren’t robots or computer programs. They have values and a worldview, and they put those in their rulings. Therefore, I think that the identity of the judges is very significant.”
Shaked said that, “in the US, they say the truth: that since judges deal with values and political matters, they should be political appointees. Republicans appoint conservative judges, Democrats appoint liberal judges.”