Tag courts
Emilio Dabed on recent court decisions solidifying the emergence of a constitutional dictatorship in the Palestinian Authority.
An interview with Professor Michael Karayanni of Hebrew University’s Law Faculty about his recent book, Conflicts in a Conflict: A Conflict of Laws Case Study of Israel and the Palestinian Territories.
Muna Haddad: Referring to Palestinian villages as “unlawful clusters” is just one small example of how the state of Israel misuses language to distort history and deny rights to Palestinians.
Sawsan Zaher: In the Israeli economy, dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs often are left to some 170,000 foreign workers, among them 55,000 Palestinian workers from the West Bank. Numerous NGO reports and media exposes have documented the abuses faced by these workers. Yet the most vulnerable and exploited segment of Israel’s labor force now faces yet another barrier to justice: in August, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked issued a new regulation requiring most foreign workers to deposit a financial guarantee as a condition to proceed with lawsuits against their employers in the country’s labor courts. As a result, whatever rights these workers should enjoy by law will likely be too expensive to actually enforce.
A new regulation effectively shuts West Bank Palestinians out of Israeli labor courts. It also reveals how Israel uses laws and regulations to seize Palestinian land while denying Palestinians rights.
Israel has long been accused of partially or incrementally annexing territories seized through war and subject to settlement, especially the West Bank and Golan Heights. Here is a breakdown of the different instruments by which Israel has applied parts of its domestic legal system to the territories occupied in 1967, with the ultimate effect of creating a segregated regime of unequal laws for Palestinians and Israelis.
Suhad Bishara: Israel has not merely limited the freedom of speech – it has done so in a specific way, allowing some “liberal” forms of dissent while strictly regulating those it sees as mounting ideological challenges to Zionism.
Emilio Dabed: No Palestinian leader has ever had the powers concentrated today in Abbas’ hands. To maintain this state of affairs or to secure the same powers for his successor, the Constitutional Court stands ready to help.