INDEPENDENCE OF THE JUDICIARY

The PA has interfered with the judicial branch of government and undermined or refused to enforce decisions taken by the courts. Although a thorough examination of the judicial system is beyond the scope of this report, a few examples illustrate the control that the PA has sought to exercise over the judiciary.

On June 13, 1996, Raji Sourani and Khader Shkirat, attorneys for detained human rights activist Eyad Sarraj, filed a petition with the High Court, asking it to rule on the legality of Dr. Sarraj's arrest and detention. Specific issues raised included the denial of access to a lawyer and the fact that a drug possession case had been brought, without explanation, before the state security court instead of a criminal court. On June 16, the High Court gave the PA five days to respond to this petition. The PA never responded, thereby showing disrespect for judicial orders. A hearing was set for July 1 and then rescheduled for July 14. When the hearing was finally held, the attorney general still had not submitted a response. The court decided to dismiss the petition challenging Sarraj's arrest. By that time, he had already been released, but the charges were still pending against him. The case never went to trial.

On August 18, 1996, the Palestinian High Court ordered the PA to release ten Birzeit University students who had been detained for almost six months without charge or trial. The court ruling came in response to a petition filed on June 26, 1996, by a group of five Palestinian lawyers, in cooperation with the Human Rights Action Program at Birzeit. The lawyers viewed this petition as a test case on behalf of ten out of the hundreds of detainees who had been arrested without warrants and held for one hundred days or longer, without charge or trial.181 Despite the court's ruling, the attorney general told one of the lawyers that he refused to release the students until he conferred withPresident Arafat.182 Five of the students were held until the end of month, and the remaining five were released between mid-November and mid-January. None of the students was charged or tried.

In an apparent retaliatory move, the PA forced the resignation of the judge who had ordered the students' release. On August 27, one week after ruling in the case, Chief Justice Amin Abd al-Salam received a resignation order signed by the head of the PA employment bureau. He responded that retiring a High Court judge was outside the mandate of the employment bureau. The bureau referred the matter to the PA cabinet, which upheld the decision.183

The failure to enforce judicial decisions is also evident in ordinary civil and criminal cases. For example, Khader Shkirat, general director of LAW, described the following case to Human Rights Watch:

Someone was killed during the intifada [years]-a homicide. When the PA police came to Hebron [the areas around the city which were designated Area B under Oslo II] they arrested [the suspected perpetrator]. They didn't follow legal procedures, didn't charge him-and they also imprisoned seven members of his family. On June 25, 1996, the High Court ruled these detainees should be released because they had been illegally arrested. But the police refused to release them. They just ignored the order and the judge can't do anything.184

A judge from the West Bank, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told Human Rights Watch:

The PA does not respect and does not want to respect the decisions of the courts if they are against the authority or any person related to them. The decision-makers in the PA think they are a higher authority than the judiciary. The authority doesn't need to threaten judges, because all they have to do is ignore the decision. They don't respect our decisions and they don't respect the people, because they interfere in and influence even civil cases and disputes between people.185