August 13, 1995
Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak is named the president of the court, a position from which he expands the power of the court.
Born in Lithuania in 1936, Barak survived the Holocaust after being smuggled out of the Kovno ghetto in a potato sack. After the war, the Barak family made aliyah to Israel, where Barak completed his education, earning law degrees and a Ph.D. He became a law professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was named its law dean in 1974.
In 1975 he became Israel’s attorney general, an office he held for three years. Toward the end of his term as attorney general, Prime Minister Menachem Begin asked Barak to serve as an adviser in the peace negotiations with Egypt. Barak was a key part of the Israeli delegation at Camp David in September 1978.
That same month, Barak was appointed to the Supreme Court. He served 28 years as a justice. During his time as the president or chief justice of the court from 1995 to 2006, he pushed to expand the court’s power, especially in protecting civil liberties and personal freedoms, often from government rulings or military actions. He removed many restrictions on individuals petitioning the court.
In a landmark decision in 1995, Barak said that in the absence of a true Israeli constitution, Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation stood above other Israeli laws.
