Palestinian Legislative Council

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Palestinian Legislative Council building in Ramallah 2009
Palestinian Legislative Council building in Ramallah 2011

The Palestinian Legislative Council ( Arabic المجلس التشريعي الفلسطيني, DMG al-Maǧlis at-tašrīʿī al-Filasṭīnī , English Palestinian Legislative Council , PLC ) is the Parliament of the Palestinian Territories and the Palestinian Authority . The Legislative Council is a unicameral parliament with 132 seats, half of which are allocated via a list election and half via a complicated majority election with several seats per constituency. The last election took place on January 25, 2006. The legislative period is four years.

history

The Legislative Council was first elected on January 20, 1996 as a provisional under the Interim Agreement on the West Bank and Gaza Strip and the 1995 Electoral Law. Due to the pure majority vote, 55 of the 88 elected MPs were members of Yasser Arafat's Fatah party . Initially, the Legislative Council had no codified powers. The first legislative period was originally supposed to end at the end of a transition phase, in 1999 at the latest. However, Arafat kept delaying new elections, so that a new electoral law could only be passed and new elections scheduled after his death. These took place in early 2006.

Arafat also continued to delay the so-called Basic Law , which was presented in 1997 and established the legislative competence and budget rights of the Legislative Council. It only came into force in 2002. The Prime Minister and the Cabinet have also been dependent on the Council's confidence since 2003.

In the 2006 elections, Hamas won a good 44% of the votes cast and, with 74 out of 132 seats, the absolute majority of the seats. In contrast, Fatah was only able to win 45 seats. On June 29, 2006, numerous parliamentarians were arrested as part of " Operation Summer Rain ". "Currently, there are nine MPs in Israeli custody" that the reported Christian media group KEP belonging Israel network end of June of 2010.

On January 19 and 20, 2012, the Israeli security forces arrested first President Abd al-Aziz Duwaik and then MP Khaled Tafesh . A few days later, the police broke into the premises of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) in East Jerusalem , where two other politicians had sought protection. Were arrested Khaled Abu Arafeh , a former minister in the government of the Palestinian Authority in March 2006 , and the deputy Mohammed Toutah . As long as there are no criminal charges against them, the two Palestinian politicians are to be deported from East Jerusalem.

Seat of the Council

There is an assembly and office building in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip . Until the new building was built in the center of Ramallah (Khalil al-Wazir street), the headquarters were in Al-Bireh near the Muqata ( Majlis street). The building in Gaza has since been destroyed by Israel. Because of the travel restrictions for the MPs, meetings with video conferencing took place. Since Hamas came to power in Gaza, only the meetings in Ramallah are relevant.

Suffrage

Of the 132 seats on the Legislative Council, 66 each are determined in a trench voting system using two independent procedures. Every eligible voter votes with two votes, which means that voting is possible. One half of the mandates are awarded by simple proportional representation with a 2% blocking clause . The remaining 66 seats are awarded by majority vote across 16 constituencies. Each of these constituencies sends one to nine members to the Legislative Council, depending on its population size. A special feature is that in four constituencies one or two seats are reserved for candidates from the Christian minority.

In each constituency, voters may cast a maximum of as many candidates one vote as the constituency may send delegates. The candidates with the most votes are elected.

The 2005 electoral law also contains in Article 5 a system of women's quotas for nominations. This means that at least one in three to five MPs elected by proportional representation must be a woman.

Current composition

The 2006 elections resulted in the following composition:

Political party Seats
Hamas 76
Fatah 43
DFLP 3
Independent Palestine 2
Third way 2
Badil 2
Independent 4th

MPs

Well-known members of the Palestinian Legislative Council elected in 2006 include:

Deceased MPs:

  • Imil Jarjoui (Fatah), constituency: East Jerusalem (died of a heart attack in 2007)
  • Said Siam (Hamas), constituency: Ghaza City (killed in an Israeli air strike in 2009 as part of " Operation Cast Lead ")

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Analysis of suffrage and election results of the 2006 elections on Wahlrecht.de
  2. ↑ "Israel releases Hamas leader"  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Israel Network , June 21, 2010.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.israelnetz.com  
  3. ^ "Israel's Army arrests Hamas MPs" , Wiener Zeitung , January 20, 2012. Queryed on April 14, 2015.
  4. ↑ "Israeli police penetrate the ICRC office" , derStandard.at , January 23, 2012. Queryed on January 24, 2012.