A watchdog group has written to Heritage Minister Amichay Eliyahu, urging him to adopt the professional opinion of the Justice Ministry’s pardons department and recommend that President Isaac Herzog not issue a pardon for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The letter from the liberally inclined Movement for Quality Government in Israel comes following indications from Eliyahu that he will recommend that Herzog issue a pardon, despite the pardons department determining that Netanyahu’s request for one does not meet the relevant criteria.

Justice Minister Yariv Levin delegated his authorities over the pardon issue to Eliyahu several weeks ago, due to a possible conflict of interest Levin had in the matter.

“A pardon for the prime minister, while the criminal process is ongoing, and in opposition to professional officials, would severely harm the rule of law and the principle of the separation of powers,” the Movement for Quality Government told Eliyahu in its letter on Sunday.

Netanyahu filed his pardon request last November, even though his trial on corruption charges in three different cases has yet to conclude.

He is standing trial on one charge of bribery, as well as three charges of fraud and breach of trust, after being indicted in 2020.

US President Donald Trump has heavily pressured Herzog to grant Netanyahu’s request, speaking out harshly against the Israeli president for failing to accede to his repeated demands that he issue a pardon.

Pardon requests before a conviction are both highly unusual and rare, but there is precedent for such pardons in certain circumstances, and the issue has come before the High Court.

In 1986, the court determined, in what has become known as the Barzilai ruling, that pardons in such situations could only be issued “when it was made clear that the applicants admitted having committed the criminal acts for which they asked to be pardoned,” something Netanyahu has not done, including in his pardon request.

The pardon process requires the Justice Ministry’s pardons department to draw up a position paper on Netanyahu’s pardon request. The justice minister, or in this case Eliyahu, the delegated minister, then writes his own position paper.

Both position papers are then transmitted to the legal department of the president’s office, and, after review, the president’s legal adviser draws up their own position paper.

All three position papers are then sent to the president for a final decision.

The rule of thumb in administrative law is that the position adopted by professional officials, in this case the pardons department and the president’s legal adviser, is the one that should be adopted by the decision-making official.

The president is, however, entitled to ignore those positions, should he so wish.

Last week, Eliyahu said that he had finished drafting his position paper after consulting “intellectuals, security officials, rabbis, IDF reservists, jurists, and thought leaders,” and would submit it as soon as possible to the office of the president.

The week before, the far-right minister was more explicit about his attitude toward the issue.

He wrote on X that the pardons department’s position paper suffered from a “deep failure of perspective,” and said that the “legal bureaucracy” was “trying to examine a historic and unprecedented national and constitutional event through the narrow and technical glasses of the usual criminal process.”

Eliyahu added, “It is totally ignoring that the pardon authority is external from the regular space of the justice system.”

He also alleged that the pardons department based its finding that Netanyahu’s request did not meet pardon criteria on the Barzilai ruling in order to prevent the prime minister’s request from being accepted.

Additionally, Eliyahu disputed the idea that the Barzilai ruling had conditioned a pardon before a conviction on an admission of guilt, asserting, despite Justice Meir Shamgar’s explicit wording, that the decision only established that a pardon could be given before a conviction.

Those claims by Eliyahu have led critics to believe that he intends to write a position paper approving a pardon for Netanyahu, and ignoring the position of the pardons department.

“The prime minister’s request for a pardon does not meet the criteria set forth in law, and the pardons department itself has explicitly stated this,” Stav Livne Lahav, head of the Movement for Quality Government’s legal department, wrote to Eliyahu.

“A pardon in the midst of a criminal proceeding — without a confession, without [expression of] remorse, and without resignation from office — would expropriate the criminal proceeding from the hands of the judiciary and do serious harm to the rule of law,” she added, and called on Eliyahu to adhere to the position of the “professional bodies.”

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