Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Wednesday that Foreign Affairs Ministry Director-General Eden Bar Tal will serve as interim civil service commissioner (CSC) for one month.
The announcement came a day after a High Court of Justice ruling that the prime minister must appoint a permanent CSC via a competitive procedure.
Bar Tal has de facto fulfilled the position since the end of previous interim CSC Roi Kahlon three-month tenure in April. However, the legality of the new interim appointment is unclear in the wake of the High Court ruling, and will likely be challenged in court.
The CSC is the official supervisor of the state’s tens of thousands of workers in the public sector. Their authorities include chairing a large number of appointment and firing committees for various high-level positions; approving government requests to recruit employees without a tender; implementing government policy regarding the public sector, and more.
The issue of the appointment of the new CSC has been especially sensitive in recent months, due to the government’s attempts to fire two high level officials, Attorney-General Gali Baharav-Miara and Shin Bet director Ronen Bar, who has announced recently that he will step down of his own accord on June 15.
While the CSC is involved in appointing many high-ranking public sector jobs, the method of appointing a CSC is not laid out in law.
The law merely says that the CSC is appointed by the government in a process that is exempt from a tender. A previous government decision in 2018 said that a permanent appointment method must be determined and that the attorney-general must be consulted on the matter.
Netanyahu, however, rejected the A-G’s proposal, which was for an independent selection committee, and instead attempted to pass a government measure giving him the power to choose the candidate.
At first, the prime minister proposed that the candidate of his choice then be vetted on the basis of their integrity, but he later amended the proposal such that a new ad hoc vetting committee would examine both the candidate’s integrity and their professional qualifications.
Prime minister's proposal unlawful, according to majority opinion
The majority opinion in the 2-1 ruling on Monday was that the prime minister’s proposal was unlawful, since it did not include “sufficient guarantees for maintaining the independent, state-oriented, and nonpolitical nature of the role or for selecting the most professionally suitable candidate,” according to a summary of the ruling published by the court’s spokesperson.
“Furthermore, the majority opinion determined that there is no longer room for the practice in which the political echelon decides and modifies the appointment mechanism at its discretion, based on considerations that are not transparent to the public,” the summary read.
The minority opinion, penned by Deputy Chief Justice Noam Solberg, argued that “it is very difficult to determine that there is a legal obligation to appoint the commissioner through a competitive process, as the law explicitly exempts it from the requirement of a competitive tender,” according to the summary.
Per Solberg, “Given that the legislator chose to push the tender – that is, the competitive appointment process – ‘through the door,’ there is no room to reintroduce it ‘through the window’ via judicial review of administrative discretion,” the summary read.
Several ministers and MKs from the coalition criticized the ruling.
In a statement accompanying the announcement of Bar Tal’s appointment, attributed to the Prime Minister’s Office, Netanyahu criticized the High Court ruling and said he would support bill proposals to codify his proposal for the CSC appointment method in law, thus overcoming the ruling.
“For the past year, and in the midst of a multifront war, the government has been trying to appoint a permanent civil service commissioner in the same manner as previous commissioners were appointed. But the attorney-general, backed by the High Court of Justice, blocked this effort,” the prime minister said.
He then echoed arguments made in Solberg’s dissenting opinion.
“Now, the court is taking an even further step. It is acting as a legislative authority, overturning its own previous ruling and interpreting the law in complete contradiction to its wording and the intention of the legislator (the law explicitly states that ‘the tender requirement shall not apply’),” Netanyahu’s statement read.
“The government will support the legislative proposals submitted yesterday, which are intended to restore the previous state of affairs as explicitly determined by the legislator, to end the disruption to the civil service,” the Prime Minister’s Office’s statement read.