Coronavirus, Human Rights, Middle East The Israeli Supreme Court Checks COVID-19 Electronic Surveillance

Can the Israeli executive continue to authorize the state’s internal security service to conduct electronic contact tracing of COVID-19 patients without statutory authorization? On April 26, the Supreme Court of Israel said no. The court held in Ben Meir v. Prime Minister that executive authorization of the program without explicit statutory authority violated the nondelegation doctrine as it applies in Israel.

The decision is remarkable because of the court’s willingness to potentially pull the plug on what the government has portrayed as a key public safety program in the middle of a national and global emergency. At the same time, the decision also offers concessions to the government. The court opted for a broad definition of “national security” to determine when the government can deploy the internal security service, the Israeli Security Agency (ISA), to address a domestic crisis. It also largely avoided imposing any binding legal constraints on the appropriate trade-off between privacy and public safety in ISA domestic COVID-19 surveillance.

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