2016-12-14

West Bank & Gaza

West Bank / Gaza

Given the importance of MUSAWA’s publications as tools for monitoring the performance of the justice sector, a special consultation round was organized and conducted on 14/12/2016, connecting the West Bank and Gaza through video conference, to discuss the 19th issue of Eye on Justice magazine and 27th issue of Justice and Law magazine.

The session included a number of legal figures both from the West Bank and Gaza; members of the Public Prosecution and employees at the High Judicial Council. The overall purpose of the consultation round was to talk about the content of both publications in order to identify points of strength and weakness, and to discuss the means possible for developing the oversight role monitory magazines play in observing the performance of the justice sector.

At the end of the session, participants gave the following recommendations based on their conclusions: include a course about commenting on court rulings in the curricula of Palestinian universities, collecting comments from Palestinian commenters rather than depending fully on commenters from Jordan or Egypt for the former are the most competent to give remarks on court rulings, and introduce the commenters and their experiences by publishing their CVs. In addition, participants believe it is highly essential to incorporate MUSAWA’s accomplishments in relation to human rights and putting an end to law-violations into its periodic publications. It is also very important to make sure that these publications reach all community groups, especially people who do not work in the legal profession.

Furthermore, participants addressed issues related to the design of MUSAWA’s publications. They suggested that the magazines be re-designed in a way that better attracts the reader, in addition to indexing Eye on Justice magazine, and developing a general brief to give an overall idea about the content of the magazine.