Soccer Dad

Judicial review palestinian style

There's something that's both quaint and incongruous about this report:

In the meantime, Palestinian lawyers who were involved in drafting the Palestinian Basic Law, or interim constitution, were disputing the legality of Mr. Abbas’s emergency government, Reuters reported.

Anis al-Qasem, who oversaw the writing of the Basic Law, and a fellow independent Palestinian constitutional lawyer, Eugene Cotran, told Reuters that Mr. Abbas had the power to dismiss Ismail Haniya of Hamas, the prime minister of the previous Hamas-led unity government.

But they said the law did not grant Mr. Abbas the power to appoint a new government without legislative approval or the right to suspend articles of the Basic Law pertaining to the need for parliamentary approval, as he did last month.

I guess, given the chaos, I should be grateful that someone wonder about such legal niceties. However Mr. Abbas's authority to fire a government and appoint another in its place really doesn't much matter when his thugs are telling Hamas politicians, not to show for work.

The next day, scores of Fatah gunmen arrived at city hall with a simple order: Hamas officials should leave and not return. But Shaheen, a bespectacled engineering professor, was back at his office within days and continues to ignore subsequent telephoned threats by Fatah's armed wing.

And let's not forget the kneecappings and hits going on in Gaza, is Hamas fretting over the legality of those actions?

Posted by SoccerDad at July 9, 2007 6:17 AM