>> Read the full Position Paper
This position paper was presented to the Knesset’s Constitution, Law and Justice Committee in response to the bill introduced by the committee’s chairman on 20 June 2023 to amend Article 15 of Basic Law: The Judiciary with regard to the reasonableness standard.
The paper emphasizes the importance of the reasonableness standard in respect to public health for the following reasons:
- Decisions by elected officials that ignore health considerations or fail to give them due weight are unreasonable and must withstand judicial review.
- The growing tendency of elected officials to ignore the expert opinions in the health field reinforces the need to preserve judicial review over their decisions.
- When the government adopts decisions that ignore health factors due to populist, arbitrary, or sectoral reasons, a petition to the Supreme Court is the only tool available to the affected citizens. If the court does not retain its authority to review the reasonableness of government decisions, public health will suffer.