Media coverage
Sawa News Agency · 2022-05-25
PalThink for Strategic Studies held a dialogue session in Gaza titled “Social and Economic Rights Between Theory and Practice” to examine the state of these rights in Palestinian law and their actual exercise in Palestinian society. Speakers discussed the gap between legal texts and implementation, linking the deterioration of social and economic rights to the Palestinian division, the suspension of oversight, and the lack of enforcement of laws, while proposing recommendations including reactivating the democratic process and ending the division. Civil society participants and Palestinian youth also raised concerns about youth deprivation and the economic conditions resulting from the division and the disruption of economic agreements.
PalThink for Strategic Studies held a dialogue session in Gaza titled “Social and Economic Rights Between Theory and Practice” to examine the state of these rights in Palestinian law and their actual exercise in Palestinian society. Speakers discussed the gap between legal texts and implementation,…
On Monday, May 23, 2022, PalThink for Strategic Studies held a dialogue meeting in Gaza City — Lighthouse, titled “Social and Economic Rights between Theory and Practice,” which examined the reality of the social and economic rights stipulated in Palestinian laws and the nature of their exercise in Palestinian society.
During his opening remarks, Omar Shaban, Director of PalThink, explained the importance of discussion and dialogue about the nature of the existing gap between the legal text and the practical application of social and economic rights in Palestinian society, and what conditions have come to after many long years of division. He pointed to PalThink’s diverse activities in serving Palestinian society and its constant effort to present objective approaches to the division and its catastrophic effects through the programs and projects implemented by PalThink, including the “PalThink Academy for Democracy and Human Rights Project.”
In the first session of the meeting, lawyer Bilal al-Najjar reviewed the provisions of the Palestinian Basic Law related to social and economic rights, in addition to the international conventions and covenants that the Palestinian Authority has joined, which guarantee social and economic rights. Al-Najjar explained that the problems lie in the lack of mechanisms to activate these rights in Palestinian society. He added that Article Five of the Basic Law clarified the system of government in Palestine as a “representative democratic system,” without specifying the features of governance as presidential, republican, or parliamentary, and that this is one of the main reasons for the state of Palestinian division we are living through, which has negatively affected the decline in the implementation of economic and social rights.
In the second session, community activist Dr. Khetam Abu Ouda reviewed the economic rights stipulated in Palestinian and international law, such as the right to education, health, housing, and work, as provided for in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. She described the Palestinian reality, which lacks the implementation of these rights, especially in the Gaza Strip, in addition to the suspension of oversight.
She attributed the deterioration of economic conditions and the rise in unemployment rates in Palestine in general, and in the Gaza Strip in particular, which reached 47% in the Gaza Strip compared with 16% in the West Bank, to the Palestinian division and the absence of the application of laws. She concluded her intervention with a set of recommendations that would advance economic and social rights, most notably: reactivating the democratic process, ending the state of division, and forming partisan and institutional pressure in order to secure economic rights in Palestinian society.
As for the third and final session, Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei, Director General of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, discussed the importance of the existence of the foundations of social rights in Palestinian society, which strengthen the foundations of mental health and the enjoyment of desire and hope, and which benefit self-realization and social productivity. He considered the absence of social rights to be a cause of Palestinian society’s suffering, especially among youth, who represent the glimmer of hope and the makers of change in the future.
Participants from civil society institutions and Palestinian youth presented a number of interventions at the conclusion of the dialogue workshop, reflecting the interest of different sectors of society and of those participating in the meeting in social and economic rights and the weakness of their practical implementation. Student Jumana Sanjar, one of the former trainees in PalThink’s programs, presented an intervention on “the deprivation experienced by Palestinian youth at the political, economic, and social levels,” while Aya Ashour addressed the economic reality Palestine is experiencing as a result of the division and the suspension of economic agreements, especially the Paris Economic Protocol, which could directly contribute to reviving the Palestinian economy and positively reflect on the social reality.
Text © Sawa News Agency — archived here with attribution to the source. — Machine translation for archival reference. — Original source