Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Justice Minister Yariv Levin decided to appoint Prof. Ron Shapira as Israel’s representative ad hoc judge at the International Court of Justice in The Hague, replacing retired Supreme Court President Aharon Barak, who resigned last month for personal reasons.
Barak was appointed the Israeli representative in The Hague following South Africa’s lawsuit alleging genocide in Gaza and was able to influence the other judges with his familiarity with Israel’s military policies. As a result, The Hague Court refrained from issuing an order to stop the fighting in the Gaza Strip as South Africa demanded, and later, following the operation in Rafah, it issued an order to stop the fighting in the city, but under conditions that were interpreted in Israel as allowing the continued operation.
Shapira, 60, is a professor of jurisprudence who serves as the dean of the Peres Academic Center in Rehovot and head of the Board of Directors of Independent Colleges. He also serves on the advisory board of the Israel Law & Liberty Forum, alongside conservative luminaries Prof. Daniel Friedmann and Prof. Talia Einhorn. In the past, he was dean of the Bar Ilan University Law School and lectured at Tel Aviv University. Prof. Shapira specializes in legal procedures, evidence law, criminal law, and mathematical formulations of legal doctrines.
Shapira is on the record as supporting Netanyahu against AG Gali Baharav-Miara and signed a letter by law professors that supported Yariv Levin’s judicial reform.
Shapira supported Netanyahu against AG Baharav-Miara who demanded appointing a search committee for the position of civil service commissioner, which Netanyahu rejected, demanding his right to appoint the commissioner. Prof. Shapira wrote in a Ynet column that the AG’s position “marks an extraordinary radicalization, from an Israeli and international point of view, of handing over the positions of power in the country to the top of the civil service.”
In another column he published this month, Prof. Shapira addressed Netanyahu’s political future, writing: “The political system will get along better without Netanyahu, but the possibility that he will leave of his own accord does not occur to anyone. The possibility that he will leave as part of a plea agreement in the criminal case does not appear to be in the cards either. In any case, such an arrangement would be terrible from another point of view, since it would establish an unbearable power for the prosecutors, who, contrary to what is customary in most democratic countries, do not need public or judicial approval to file such a charge.”
Make that man a Supreme Court Justice!
