Justice Minister Yariv Levin sharply criticized the President of the Supreme Court, Judge Yitzhak Amit, on Saturday night.
"Judge Amit is not the President of the Supreme Court - I do not recognize him and will not recognize him because he was elected through an invalid and illegal process," he clarified in an interview with Ayala Hasson on Kan 11.
"Judges decide to impose their appointments on the Justice Minister through an order and an illegal process. If I legitimize this, it will continue, and the system will persist."
"I am not willing to accept the system that once existed, where they do whatever they please," the minister added, accusing the Supreme Court judges: "They trample on the Knesset, the government, and the public, and I am not willing to accept that."
"The root of the problem in the judicial system is the issue of the composition of the Supreme Court judges. My colleague, Minister [Yitzhak] Wasserlauf, submitted a detailed petition to the Supreme Court regarding the ugly selective enforcement taking place, and the court dismissed it entirely," stated Levin.
He concluded, "There is no way to change the situation we are in without changing the composition of the Supreme Court judges."
"After they said the [judicial] reform was already dead, I managed to pass a historic change in the Judicial Selection Committee," he said. "I succeeded in appointing dozens of judges to district courts and other courts - judges who never had a chance to be selected before. Some of those we called thought we were pranking them and couldn’t believe it was true because, for so many years, they were not chosen for non-substantive reasons."