Some of the challenges facing the Palestinian legal system and profession are discussed below.
Due to occupation by successive foreign powers, the laws in force today in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are a combination of Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Egyptian, Israeli and Palestinian Authority influences. The laws from each period remained in force except to the extent that they were amended or replaced by the laws of the subsequent authority. Thus, even some laws from the Ottoman period are still valid today. However, with the signing of the Oslo accords, there is for the first time a Palestinian legislature enacting laws to address the specific needs of Palestinians. Due to these various sources of law, there is no one place where legal professionals in Palestine can look to determine the exact status of the law on a given topic. That is the problem being addressed by the Law Center's applied research project, the Palestinian Legal Inventory, as well as its legal database which will make all these laws accessible to the Palestinian and international legal communities.
Additionally, the laws in force in the West Bank are different from those in the Gaza Strip. Therefore, the Palestinian elected legislature and the Palestinian legal community face the challenge of either passing legislation with the view of unifying the laws in force in the West Bank and in Gaza, or developing rules as to how these different laws can work together.
Due to Israeli control over education in Palestine and over the legal profession, there have not been any Palestinian law schools until very recently. Lawyers presently obtain their law degrees from foreign law schools (mainly in Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon), which do not teach the Law of Palestine. Thus there is a great need to teach the law in force here and that is the exact need which the Law Center's Master of Laws Program will address.
In the West Bank, following the Israeli military occupation in 1967 and the subsequent annexation of East Jerusalem, removal of the Court of Appeal from Jerusalem, and non-compliance with the Geneva Conventions, the lawyers practicing in the West Bank in 1967 went on strike in protest, and many have not returned to practice to this day. As a result, the Israeli officer in charge of the Judiciary has assumed the role that the Bar Association used to play, such as controlling admission to the profession and establishing regulations for the training of law graduates.
At present, there are 3 separate bar associations (2 in the West
Bank, 1 in Gaza) which need to be unified in order to set national
professional standards. Due to this lack of a unified bar association
and as a result of the Israeli indifference to the quality of
the legal profession in Palestine, there has been little or no
attention paid to the competency or training of legal professionals,
thus leading to a deterioration of professional standards. Further,
without a unified Bar Association, there are no continuing education
programs for Palestinian lawyers. This is being addressed through
the Law Center's Continuing Legal Education programs.