The 2006 Palestinian Juvenile Protection Law A Quest for Further Reform

Abstract

The State of Palestine became party to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child of 20 November 1989 (CRC)1 on 2 April 2014.2 Less than two years later, on 4 February 2016, President Mahmoud Abbas enacted Decree-Law No. 4 Concerning Juvenile Protection (hereinafter "Juvenile Protection Law" or "the Law"),3 which set forth the rights of children in conflict with the law and reformed the entire child justice system.4 The Law incorporated the international standards relating to children as enshrined in the CRC and other soft law rules. The question remains: would the legal texts, as manifested by the accession to the Convention and by the aforesaid Law, be materialized at the institutional and practical levels?
The number of children in conflict with the law is on the rise.5 While the number of children who broke the law in the West Bank was 637 in 2005,6 it increased into 2,457 in 2014.7 Yet no concrete effort has been undertaken to systematically resolve the issue of such children, despite the progress made at the global level and in certain states in the Middle East,8 and the significant developments of the Palestinian legal system since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.9 Jordan amended its Juvenile Rehabilitation Law of 1954,10 which has been applicable in the West Bank until early 2016, just one year after its withdrawal from that Palestinian territory during the war with Israel in 1967.11 Children in Palestine had to wait over 60 years until the new Juvenile Protection Law to be adopted in 2016.