Developing & Maintaining a Constitutional Law Portal

Introduction:
Employing all three powers (legislation, oversight, and accountability), the Legislative Authority has long played a pivotal role in the Palestinian legal and constitutional apparatus. However, a major setback has been caused by the internal Palestinian political divide, resulting in institutional and individual dysfunctions across public institutions. Besides a pressing need for rehabilitation and training, institutional frameworks should now be rebuilt. A public debate will also be launched to address past and current key challenges to operations of public authorities in Palestine.

To step up participation in this discussion and submit conclusions to relevant policy- and decision-makers, public debate will not be restricted to open forums or indoor workshops. To this avail, the Institute of Law (IoL) has worked towards creating mechanisms to ensure an enhanced public participation in public and legislative decision- and policy-making processes. The IoL envisaged mechanisms are designed to promote community participation in policies relating to specialised legal themes of public interest. To this end, the IoL will construct an online legal portal, with a particular focus on constitutional aspects and functions of all the three powers. In the first year of its activity, the legal portal will concentrate on and provide conceptual links across functions of the Legislative Authority. Through the portal, a legal mobilisation will be in place with a view to address target topics. Informed research, policy papers, and position papers will be compiled on current and new legal themes within the Palestinian legal system. Deficient legal aspects of this system will also be explored.

Overall objective:
As an addition to the existing Al-Muqtafi databases, the IoL is planning to build a web-based interactive legal resource portal that will enhance the delivery of legal services. The overall objective of the portal is based on the notion of public participation. By combining three compartments: legal knowledge, research and ICT tools, the IoL team will provide reliable information about the Palestinian political and legal system and at the same time have the scope to obtain necessary feedback on these issues

Specific objectives:

• To engage the beneficiaries in the decision-making process by providing them with the necessary tools and platform to discuss, analyse and provide feedback about the Palestinian political and constitutional issues using the appropriate ICT tools.

• To raise the capacity of the justice sector in providing legal services using cutting edge technologies

Duration:
1/1/2015-31/12/2015

Status of the project:
Ongoing


Donor:
Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS)

Team:

• Mahmoud Alawneh – Director

• Razan Barghouti- Researcher

• Ala Hamad- Researcher

• Ahmad Hamo

• Abed Hamarsheh

Activities and outputs:

• Design and Development of the Portal

Building a Family Law Court Judgments Database

introduction:

The Palestinian Authority took several legislative and institutional measures to modernise the judiciary and to create new courts. Nonetheless, the laws establishing the organisation of the Ecclesiastical courts for the Christian Communities and Family Courts for Moslems dating back to the Ottoman rule and the British Mandate period remained in force.

The jurisdiction of family courts compliments the regular judiciary (in civil, administrative and criminal matters). According to the Palestinian Basic Law family courts are responsible for all personal status matters, which affect every Palestinian citizen from the date of his birth until his death. The family courts have original exclusice jurisdiction in the following matters: marriage, divorce, alimony, inheritance, kinship, adoption and endwoments.
In order to modernize the family courts and introduce new technologies and facilitate the services it provides to the public, the courts started to use computers in carrying out their daily functions. A central computer network is still to be established in order to connect all courts together. A new archiving system shall be developed in order to protect the historical documents and old files giving the fact that the family courts have a large number of registries and documents which are a hundred years old. Such registries document the various social, economic, and political aspects of the Palestinian history.

To achieve the strategic goal of classifying court judgments and providing easy access to these documents to the general public, members of the Family Courts Judicial Council approached the Institute of Law in order to compile all judgments related to family matters and make them accessible on the Institute of Law’s Al-Muqtafi - Legislation and Court Judgments Database. For this purpose a committee was appointed by the Upper Council for Shari’a Jurisdictions. The committee consists of 5 family court judges, who will be working during the lifetime of the project with the Institute of Law’s team

Overall objectives:
The overall objective of the project is to foster access to legal information as an integral part of the rule of law, stimulate reform initiatives, particularly in matters of family law, and increase professionalism and accountability of the Family Court Judges.

Specific objectives:
1) To provide legal professionals and ordinary citizens with access to unpublished contemporary legal information and have better accessibility to information regarding court judgments in matters of personal status.
2) To elucidate the rationale of the family courts judgments through experts and by subjecting them to analysis, criticism, and evaluation
3) To build a modern and easily accessible Family Court Judgments Database as a new component within Al-Muqtafi
4) To enhance the capacity of the family courts’ staff and judges, in managing and dealing with the cases.
5) To disseminate the outputs of the project to the project’s direct beneficiaries and the wider public

Duration:
1 January 2011- 31 December 2012

Donor:

Representative Office of Denmark, Ramallah

Team:

Legal Researchers, Technical Team. Administrative / Support staff, Other (Contractual Services)

Outputs:

Legal and Judicial Component

• Compiling and converting approx. 10,000 court judgments.
• The developed database will be enriched by the commentaries that the legal experts will provide. In addition, the database will include legal principles. These principles will be extracted from leading cases that will be selected and classified through the research team

Technical Component

• Typing, photocopying and scanning. The team will retype the compiled judgments, photocopy and scan the judgments and convert the typed judgments into XML.
• All converted documents will be edited.
• Development of a “Kashaf”, which would serve as an electronic aided classification and indexing tool for judgements
• Full Text data entry. All converted documents will be entered into the database.
• Linking referential information to the legislation database.
• Translation of the initial information of the judgments into English.
• The database will be consisting of two connected databases at the end of the project; the first deals with the Palestinian regulations since the Othman period and the other dealing with the family courts judgements since 1994.
• Translation: All referrential information of the judgments will be translated into English.
• Improvement of the structure, form, and contents of legal texts, whether in legislation or judicial judgments. Information management leads towards instituting a system suitable for case file management and help in building a renewal of legal culture engaged in constructive criticism and constant revision. Ultimately, this can be very instrumental in furthering the judge’s message of justice to the public, improving the efficiency of the judicial authority, and in pressing for active public participation in the legislative policymaking.

“Enhancing Democracy” Local Elections

Introduction:
The project is an attempt to reinforcing and fostering the principles of integrity and transparency in local elections, and promoting democracy during the whole process. The project will focus on building skills of key actors in addition to raising awareness of the best practices. This will reflect positively in promotion of democracy in the state.

Overall objective:
The project aims mainly to promote skills of legal practitioners and interest elections observers on the one hand, and on raising public awareness of the elections procedures and different phases, in the West Bank and Gaza

Specific objectives:

• Building the capacities of actors in civil society organizations in the oversight of the electoral process

• Developing legal practitioners’ capacities in managing electoral challenges and applying all related mechanisms and procedures

• Raising the awareness of Local Authorities’ members on their rights and obligations

• Disseminating the electoral culture in the civil society organizations

• Prepare awareness guiding manuals for the civil society on election challenges and observation of local elections and their role in promoting the bases and principles of integrity of the electoral process.

Duration:
July- December 2011

Status of the project:
Ended

Donor:
Konrad Adenauer

Team:

• Mahmoud Alawneh

• Haya Haj Ahmad

• Fayez Bkeirat

• Nidal Barham

Activities and outputs:

• Three guiding brochures on:

a. Electoral challenges and their procedures and management

b. Oversight of electoral process and its principles and procedures

C. Rights, Obligations of Local Authorities’ Members

• A one day conference on the concept of “Statehood

Reviewing and Drafting and Integrated Legal and Regulatory Frame Work for Forensic Science and Forensic Medicine

Introduction:
Since the PNA was established, the Palestinian justice sector has seen a paradigmatic shift. On the ground, the justice sector has marked key developments, including in relation to institution building and human resources. Although the Palestinian legislative context has demonstrated tangible improvements in the law-making process, several deficiencies and challenges are still in place. Integrated legal frameworks have not been devised with a view to establish forensic medicine centers and forensic laboratories. To materialize the purpose of these facilities, legal frameworks are needed to ensure an informed regulation of the forensic medicine activity. Accordingly, better pieces of legislation can be enacted in line with relevant international standards, ensuring an enabling legal environment that maintains criminal justice. Clearly defined approaches should guide the institutional capacity building process, contributing to criminal justice improvements.

In light of these developments, the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) is required to set forth a legislative foundation and manage this vital sector. This task has not yet been accomplished, however. Regulations that govern forensic medicine and forensic laboratories are multiple and contradictory. All that is available is short, inadequate secondary legislation, which cannot provide a leverage for legal reform across the justice sector.

Overall objective:
This project is essentially designed to review the Draft Laws on Forensic Medicine and Forensic Laboratories with a view to assess how consistent they are with the Palestinian legal framework and relevant international standards. To ensure sound enforcement, a new draft law will be developed and presented. Needed bylaws of the draft law will be also developed. Once approved, the draft law will be enforced immediately

Specific objectives:
In particular, the project will achieve the following goals:

1.   Review the Draft Laws on Forensic Medicine and Forensic Laboratories to examine how consistent they are with the Palestinian legal framework and applicable international standards.
2. Following final drafting, identify pieces of secondary legislation needed to enforce the new draft law.
3.  Reproduce the Draft Laws on Forensic Medicine and Forensic Laboratories in the form of a consolidate draft law.
4. Develop items of secondary legislation needed for implementation of the new draft law using good legislative drafting techniques and in line with the Palestinian legal system.

Duration:
1/3/2015- 31/8/2015

Status of the project:
Ongoing

Donor:
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)


Team:

• Mahmoud Alawneh – Director

• Razan Barghouti- Researcher

• Ala Hamad- Researcher

Activities and outputs:

• A comprehensive legal review of the Draft Law on Forensic Medicine and Draft Law on Forensic Laboratories

• Develop legislative policy papers and redraft regulations