Broadcasting Bill Advances Despite Sharp Legal Warnings

The coalition is trying to complete legislation to dismantle free media in Israel through an accelerated process, using a bill draft that has not gone through the full approval and revision process of the legal advisory team of the Knesset committee discussing it, the committee’s legal adviser, attorney Pinchas Gort, warned today, Tuesday. The warning comes amid concern that the Knesset could be dissolved as soon as next week.

"We cannot endorse the full version sent by the Communications Ministry and distributed this morning to committee members ahead of the objections and voting hearings," Gort wrote to committee members. "We were not given the opportunity to address the incorporation of the comments and corrections we believed were required, especially regarding the part we had not even gone over, not even in a preliminary manner."

In recent days, the Communications Ministry and the coalition have been trying to complete passage of the Broadcasting Bill before the end of the current Knesset session, which is likely to be its last before the approaching elections. The goal is to force major changes in the regulation of the local communications market. The most draconian move, the establishment of a new Broadcasting Authority with broad powers to shut down broadcast channels, was split off from the bill. But the current text still includes changes such as canceling bans on cross-ownership, requiring structural separation between the news companies of Keshet and Reshet and the channel owners, and granting financial benefits worth tens of millions of shekels to the pro-government channels 14 and i24.

This morning, lawmakers on the special committee preparing the bill for second and third readings received a final version of the bill before the committee vote. "A disgrace," called it MK Shelly Tal Meron of Yesh Atid. "Jumping clauses, an embarrassing lack of continuity, and a crazy mess never seen before in the Knesset."

However, an even bigger problem is that the final version was distributed to lawmakers before the committee’s legal advisory team completed its review and incorporated the necessary corrections. According to a letter Gort sent to lawmakers, the team began reviewing the text last Tuesday evening, with the intention of distributing it to lawmakers two days later, on Friday morning.

"On Friday afternoon, after we had gone over about 60 percent of the bill," he wrote, "we were asked to forward to the Communications Minister the version we had reached. We made clear to the minister and to the committee chairwoman, MK Galit Distel Atbaryan, that we had identified many issues in the document requiring clarifications and corrections, some of them significant corrections that required the ministry’s response and might even necessitate a rereading of the text on those points. In addition, we found many gaps between things said in the committee by the Communications Ministry that would be included in the text and their actual incorporation. We also noted that the text did not appear in a proper legislative format, making it very difficult to standardize it and adapt it to the accepted legislative template, which also requires considerable work."

These corrections required more time than had been allotted to the committee’s legal advisory team, and even after the extension granted to the team until Monday, it still had not completed its review of the bill. Despite this, the Communications Ministry and the committee chair decided to distribute the final version without the legal team completing its review.

According to Gort, this was due to the concern raised by the minister and the committee chair that the Knesset would be dissolved next week. He added: "We made clear to the minister and the committee chair that this is a basic and necessary review, intended to prevent legislative errors and to meet the basic standard generally accepted for bills sent to committee members for drafting objections. We also said that distributing a version for objections by the Communications Ministry, without the committee’s legal adviser having completed even a preliminary review of the full proposal, is an unusual, problematic, and highly unprecedented state of affairs."

"The committee chair ultimately decided to distribute the bill as drafted by the Communications Ministry, despite the fact that we had not completed our preliminary review of all the clauses in the bill, and even though we were not allowed to review the final text to ensure that the partial comments and corrections we managed to send had indeed been incorporated."

The Knesset’s legal adviser, attorney Sagit Afik, also pointed to the problems in the updated bill draft. "The text that arrived was very flawed, had not gone through ministry legal review, lacked basic formatting, and did not include many decisions reached by the committee," she wrote in a WhatsApp group of committee members. "As a result, it required an unusually intense amount of work, far beyond what could have been anticipated. Never before has a text been submitted for objections without the committee legal adviser having reviewed it; never before has a text been submitted without the ministry’s legal adviser having reviewed it. Never before has a text been submitted from which clauses were omitted and which contained so many gaps, as in the text distributed this morning in an unusual and unprecedented manner that we have already noted."

Despite these remarks, Distel Atbaryan decided that the committee’s approval process for the bill would proceed as planned. "The legal adviser did not meet the agreed deadline and submitted the text corrections four days late and only in part," she replied to Afik. "Section 198 was mistakenly omitted by the legal advisory team, and in any case the committee members have about 40 hours to draft objections to it as well. In light of this, I do not accept the legal adviser’s position regarding extra time for formulating objections."

MK Tal Meron attacked the conduct of the Communications Ministry and the coalition. "In legislation of this scale, the committee’s legal adviser is supposed to have time to review the full text and confirm that it is proper. That did not happen here. The legal adviser found a long list of errors, omissions and clauses that were not incorporated as agreed, and even clarified in a harsh statement that he had not had time to complete the review. In practice, he reviewed only about half of the bill.

"Nevertheless, the committee members are already being asked to submit objections to a text that is not final, which is an unusual and unprecedented situation. This joins a series of defects that have accompanied the bill all along, clauses submitted at the last minute, a disputed split process, and a text that suffered from errors and omissions even this morning. In short, both the process and the bill text itself are still not ready."