Two months before the elections to the Knesset, with no publicity and no public discussion of the issue, Justice Minister Daniel Friedman has approved changes in the regulations relating to Civil Law procedures, designed to provide landlords with a separate legal track for the rapid eviction of tenants. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) intervened to the Minister demanding that the change in regulations be frozen until a public discussion of the issue was conducted, as is appropriate and expected with regards to issues with the potential to infringe on human rights so acutely.
In a letter to the Minister, ACRI Attorney Gil Gan-Mor emphasized that most tenants have limited means and are already exposed to infractions of their rights by landlords. Attorney Gan-Mor warns that this special track, whose only purpose is to allow the speeding-up of the dispossession of tenants, is liable to bring a wave of unjustified evictions. At the very least, steps should be taken to assure that the use of this fast track is limited to clearly defined cases when it is justified, and that it should not be applied capriciously on any draconian pretext.
Attorney Gan-Mor stresses in his letter that it would have been appropriate, as is the practice in other countries, to incorporate the provisions for dispossession within the framework of more comprehensive legislation that provides fair solutions to landlord-tenant relations, while serving the interests of both.
Attorney Gan-Mor wrote: “Though there is no doubt that in the light of the slowness of the courts, the rights of landlords require protection, but the solution that has been selected is one-sided. It will create new problems and adversely affect the rights of tenants. The rental market is certainly in need of reform but such a reform should be implemented in a balanced way and only after tenants have been given the opportunity to express their views on regulations which clearly affect their rights. Regrettably, this is not what has happened in this case.”
