Rule of Law

Country-Specific Projects: Palestine-Israel

Building the Palestinian Justice System

USIP’s Rule of Law Program (ROL) has spent several years examining and consulting on the evolution of the Palestinian justice system. This project is ongoing. A report and recommendations to strengthen the Palestinian justice system will be produced in late 2008.

Palestinian-Israeli Legal Dialogue

Absent a process of legal cooperation to address myriad routine legal issues and prevent tensions, normalized and peaceful life between Israelis and Palestinians will not be possible. Imagine a traffic accident between Israeli and Palestinian drivers. Which laws apply? Whose court has jurisdiction? Who will enforce the court's decision? Will insurers cover the costs? Without a fair and transparent legal process to resolve such questions, a minor accident can become a political incident—and too often does.

At the request of the Israeli and Palestinian Ministers of Justice, the United States Institute of Peace, through its Rule of Law Program, organized a special dialogue on Palestinian-Israeli legal matters. Following discussions with USIP staff, these officials established a formal committee on joint legal seminars, under a previously non-operational provision of the Oslo Accords. USIP seeks to build professional relationships between the two legal communities and enable them to jointly explore a range of issues—a process they had not been able to start without outside facilitation and that no other international party had undertaken.

At roundtables and follow-on working groups in Israel and the Palestinian territories, members of the two legal communities and foreign experts discuss practical legal issues affecting the daily interaction of their two systems, consider relevant examples of legal relations between neighboring countries around the world, and develop proposed solutions to common problems.

In February 2000, the first of these dialogues addressed the need for Israeli-Palestinian cooperation in the protection of intellectual property rights (a great concern to U.S. and European businesses). Eighty members of the two legal communities engaged in two days of productive exchanges, learning about each other's laws and processes, and exploring ways to cooperate when counterfeit CD production and smuggling involves collaboration between Israeli and Palestinian criminal elements, as it regularly did. At the end of this meeting, a top Palestinian legal official declared, "the ice has now been broken," and a senior Israeli official called it a "historic moment." A two-day joint seminar in Gaza explored options for the compensation of victims of traffic accidents. Another legal dialogue in Ramallah focused on labor and social security issues. By the beginning of the "Al Aqsa Intifida," some 150 members of the two legal communities, including relevant government officials, judges, private attorneys, legal academics and others had participated in these joint seminars. Several additional programs were in the planning stages to take place in the months that followed, along with follow-on meetings and activities from the previous joint sessions.

Officially co-sponsored by the State of Israel - Palestinian Authority Joint Legal Committee and the United States Institute of Peace, the Project on Joint Legal Seminars involved a series of joint activities, with the goal of promoting a day-to-day relationship grounded on the rule of law that can address daily problems affecting average Palestinians and Israelis—whether labor issues, traffic accidents, or representation in each other's courts—in a manner that ensures justice, transparency, mutual respect and fairness for all parties. Through the development of these working relationships and mechanisms for cooperation between Israelis and Palestinians, the Project on Joint Legal Seminars began to fill an otherwise neglected void in the Middle East peace process. USIP is working with partners on each side of the conflict to lay the groundwork for resumption of this initiative in the near future.