News Analysis: Hurdles ahead for Abbas' move to form Palestinian constitutional court

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' push to form a constitutional court faces many hurdles, especially amid an ongoing internal split among the Palestinians, analysts said.

According to an April 4 decree issued by Abbas, the nine-member court should have supremacy over all lower courts, cabinet decisions, parliament resolutions and presidential decrees.

If maternalized, the constitutional court would be the first since 1994, the year when the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was established.

Hassan al-Ouri, a legal advisor to Abbas, said the new court will watch the constitutional laws and regulations as well as the interpretation of basic law provisions and legislations.

PARLIAMENTARY APPROVAL

However, local analysts said that the Abbas decree has to first of all get approved by the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC), the parliament of the PNA that has remained inoperative since the beginning of the internal Palestinian division in 2007 between Abbas' Fatah Party and Islamic Hamas movement.

The very move by Abbas to push for establishing a constitutional court in the absence of Palestinian unity reflects "a comprehensive crisis in the Palestinian political system," said Ahmad Rafiq Awad, a political science professor at al-Quds University in the West Bank.

"Forming the court is part of a reality of an absence of the state institutions and having an unsettled political system," Awad said. "Faction and party spirits are still controlling the Palestinian political system."

While the PLC remained inoperative, efforts to convene the Palestinian National Council (PNC), the parliament in exile of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), also failed.

The last time the PNC convened was in 1996, in Gaza.

"INSTITUTIONAL VACUUM"

"The role of the main institutions in the Palestinian political system is absent, and this certainly keeps the door largely open for sudden and surprising decisions and phenomena that result in large internal controversies such as forming the constitutional court," said Awad.

He believes that the formation of the court "would bolster Abbas' power in the future as the Palestinians suffer from an endless internal split and an absence of unity."

Abbas' decree to form the court "has political implications due to an institutional vacuum," Awad said, adding that the decree contradicts the Palestinian tradition and that Abbas is "arranging the current and the future situations."

Abbas, now 81-year-old, still has no deputy.

Hamas insists that Aziz Dweik, the PLC speaker and one of its West Bank leaders, should be, according to the basic law, the transitional president of the PNA for 60 days in case Abbas quits or dies, while Fatah says that PLC was supposed to be elected in 2010, four years after the legislative elections were held in 2006.

Talal Oukal, a Gaza-based political analyst, told Xinhua that the internal division seems endless and that "it is clear that there is deep competition between the two rivals to create more realities that make the possibility for reconciliation impossible."

"One of the major fields of competition between the two rivals is judiciary and legislation," said Oukal. "There are doubts that (forming the constitutional court) will succeed due to the current division between Fatah and Hamas."

Hamas and some other factions are against forming such a court without prior coordination.

Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, rejected the Abbas' decree as "an illegal measure" reflecting the status of Abbas' "policy of uniqueness."

FULL CONSULTATION URGED

He said the matter should be consulted with all factions concerned, just as the term of Abbas as Palestinian president.

Abbas' presidential term, which had expired in 2008, was renewed after all political powers were consulted, Abu Zhuri noted.

"The same (should apply) with the formation of the constitutional court," he said. "It has to be made in accordance with all factions."

However, Hamas, which seized control of the Gaza Strip by force in 2007, also held sessions of the inoperative PLC without accordance with other Palestinian factions.

Hamas has since issued 57 laws through the PLC, which are only applicable in the Gaza Strip, while Abbas and the PNA has issued 120 laws, which are applicable in the West Bank. Endit