The Right of Civil Servants to Protest / Walla News

In mid-July 2023, our office submitted a petition to the Israeli High Court of Justice on behalf of the Israeli Democracy Guard (an NGO) against the ruling of the Israeli National Labor Court from the end of June 2023.

The National Labor Court rejected the request of attorney Shaul Cohen to allow him to participate in the protests taking place throughout the country against the government’s legislative plan called “Legal Reform.”

Our office asked Israel’s High Court of Justice to rule that the protest demonstrations are not demonstrations “on a political issue” in which public legal service employees are prohibited from participating, since these are demonstrations in which diverse publics participate and whose purpose is to preserve democracy and prevent structural damage to the justice system.

In our opinion, the ruling of the National Labor Court leads to the position that, in practice, there is a prohibition on the participation of Israeli civil servants in any demonstration and on any subject. 

The Labor court ruled that “any person’s participation in a demonstration constitutes by definition an identification, even if partial, with the ideas that the demonstration represents, just as participation in demonstrations whose purpose is to express criticism of government policy necessarily constitutes taking a critical stance against government policy.”

In the petition, we emphasized that this position voids the legislator’s intent, which distinguished between demonstrations in which civil servants are allowed to participate and demonstrations in which participation is prohibited, which are demonstrations or processions “of a political nature.”

We also asked the HCJ to determine that the interpretation given by the HCJ itself to the term “demonstrations on a political issue” in the ruling regarding the demonstrations in Goren Square in 2017 (demonstrations that were held at the time near the home of the Attorney General at the time, Avichai Mandelblit – HCJ 6536/17 Movement for the Quality of Government v. the Israel Police) obliges the Labor Court also regarding the restrictions imposed on public servants from participating in certain demonstrations, and that the restrictions in the law do not prohibit participation in any demonstration.

To read the full petition in the HCJ 5200/23 Adv. Shaul Cohen v. the National Labor Court – click here (Hebrew only).