Testimony Before the Palestinian Judiciary

by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem

I found in my mailbox at An-Najah National University, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, a summons to give testimony before the Nablus Magistrate’s Court on 30 June 2008 at eight in the morning. The summons was issued on 5 May 2008 by Judge Manal al-Masri. I noted the following observations about the form of the summons:

There is a space for the signature of the process server, but no signature appears;

There is a space for the signature of the recipient of the notice — who is supposed to be me — but no signature appears;

There is a space to record the day, date, and hour of notification, but the information is missing;

The summons opens with the words “plaintiff/plaintiffs” [muddaʿi/muddaʿin], written in a form that should, grammatically, take the nominative case ending. This is a serious error. It is well known in Arabic, particularly legal Arabic, that the case endings — nominative, accusative, genitive — change meaning, and before the law, the course of a lawsuit can change because of a grammatical error, turning the rightful party into the guilty one, and the criminal into the rightful party. For instance, someone might write a sentence that, through a misplaced case ending, reverses subject and object — turning “the men came to Muhammad” into “Muhammad came to the men,” when in fact it was Muhammad who did the coming.

There is a space for writing the name of the party requesting the testimony, but the name is missing;

The summons carries a threat, in the following words: “If you fail to appear, a warrant for your appearance will be issued against you, and you will be fined an amount not exceeding two hundred dinars”; in return, there is no undertaking by the court to compensate the person summoned to testify for the disruption to his day. I found myself asking: and what about the judge, if she fails to appear?

There is a conceptual error in the text as well, in its use of the word “tabligh” [general notification]. The correct word is “iblagh” [personal notification], since informing a specific individual is a personal act. “Tabligh” refers to general publication, such as publishing a law in the official gazette or broadcasting it through the media.

More important than any of this, however, is that I arrived at the courthouse at 7:55 in the morning. I expected bustle and crowding, given the influx of staff, but I waited until 8:20 and saw nothing but a handful of people trudging sluggishly into the courthouse. I asked about the judge who had summoned me for eight o’clock, and was told that she was running late, and that the court might not begin before nine.

I asked about the delay, and a number of staff members told me that the courts simply do not start early. One of them explained that the judges come from the cities of Jenin, Tulkarem, and Qalqilya, and are delayed by the checkpoints. But as luck would have it, the judge assigned to my case is from the city of Nablus itself. Our students at the university arrive before eight from their own home towns despite the Zionist checkpoints along the road — checkpoints that, if anything, hold up the young far more than they hold up the elderly.

I know that most Palestinian judges do not begin their day at eight o’clock; they are routinely late for official working hours, and no one holds them to account. I also know that a great many cases are subjected to a great deal of needless shaking-up and delay. The Palestinian judiciary is in need of a very great deal of reform, and the will to pursue it seems, sadly, quite sluggish.

I hurried out of the courthouse to make it to my lecture at the university, leaving my mobile phone number with the court clerk.

Source: Translated from the original Arabic, “شهادة أمام القضاء الفلسطيني” by Dr. Abdul-Sattar Kassem.