The politics of legal reform in Palestine

Journal of Palestine Studies

Volumn 27, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 51-60

  Robinson, Glenn E ^a,b  

^a NAVAL POSTGRADUATE SCHOOL   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

LEGAL SYSTEM; PALESTINIAN POLITICS;

MIDDLE EAST, OCCUPIED TERRITORIES;

EID: 0031448576     PISSN: 0377919X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2537809     Document Type: Article

References (16)

1. Of the two bar associations in the West Bank under Israeli rule, one refused to practice and went unrecognized by Israel, and the other practiced but was shunned by its Jordanian counterpart and other Palestinian lawyers.
2. The situations in which two divergent legal systems have been unified - in Cameroon, for example - involved systems within the same overall framework of Napoleonic law.
3. Raja Shehadeh, The Law of the Land: Settlements and Land Issues under Israeli Military Occupation (Jerusalem: PASSIA, 1993), p. 19.
4. The continental legal tradition is commonly used in the Arab world today largely because of its Ottoman legacy. The Ottoman empire adopted legal reforms of the nineteenth century that were based on the Napoleonic system.
5. For example, Israel formally abolished the Court of Cassation, the highest level of appeal for West Bank cases. It further transferred the Court of Appeal (which with the elimination of the Court of Cassation had become the highest court in the West Bank) out of Jerusalem to Ramallah, where it shares building space with the Ramallah District Court (the Court of First Instance) and the Ramallah Magistrate Court.
6. For a good overview of these matters, see George Emile Bisharat, Palestinian Lawyers and Israeli Rule: Law and Disorder in the West Bank (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989).
7. Ibrahim al-Daghma at the Ministry of Justice has spearheaded this effort.
8. According to Mandate law, however, the chief justice must have "the concurrence of the High Commissioner" to make such changes.
9. Abu-Madayn resigned in mid-1997, apparently under strong American and Israeli pressure after implicitly condoning the execution of Palestinian land dealers who sell land to Jewish settlers. In his letter of resignation, he complained of his lack of authority in nominating judges.
10. Thus far, the same problems have not existed between the justice minister and the chief justice of the West Bank. This is partly because of the turnover in the position of chief justice of the West Bank and partly because the chief justice in Gaza is increasingly gaining ascendance over his West Bank counterpart.
11. There is now a military attorney general as well who has taken over many of these cases.
12. These examples come from numerous interviews within the Palestinian legal community during 1995. Citing informants would put them in jeopardy.
13. Palestine Report, 13 June 1997.
14. Glenn E. Robinson, Building a Palestinian State: The Incomplete Revolution (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1997), chapter 7.
15. See Glenn E. Robinson, "The Growing Authoritarianism of the Arafat Regime," Survival, The IISS Quarterly 39, no. 2 (Summer 1997), pp. 42-56.
16. Palestine Report, 30 May 1996.