With new decree, Palestinian leader tightens grip

RAMALLAH // Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas has quietly established a constitutional court that analysts say concentrates more power in his hands and may allow him to sideline the Hamas group in the event of a succession struggle.

The nine-member body, which will have supremacy over all lower courts, was created without fanfare by presidential decree on April 3 and will be inaugurated once its ninth member is sworn in at a ceremony on Monday, officials said.

Critics say the body is packed with jurists from Mr Abbas’s Fatah party and risks deepening Palestinian political divisions. Fatah says it is Mr Abbas’s right to create the court, which it says is independent of the 81-year-old president.

“Neither the president nor any of the leaders [of Fatah] has a private agenda regarding this issue,” said Osama Al Qwasmi, the spokesman for Fatah in the West Bank. “The prime task of the constitutional court is to monitor laws. By the law, it is a completely independent body and we have full confidence in it.”

The decision comes at a time of worsening splits between Fatah and Hamas and as questions are raised about what will happen when the president steps down or if he were to die in office without a successor.

Mr Abbas took office after the death of Yasser Arafat in 2004, and was elected to a four-year term as president in 2005.

But new elections were not held in 2009 and he continues to govern by decree. Parliament has not sat since 2007.

In theory, the speaker of parliament, a Hamas member, would take over as president on an interim basis were Mr Abbas to die in office. Fatah disputes whether that remains constitutional.

While Mr Abbas may have the authority to create the court, which is being established 14 years after the Palestinians drafted a basic law, a form of constitution, some analysts see it as a way of circumventing opposition at a critical time.

“It’s a blatant power grab at a time when he knows he can get away with it,” said Grant Rumley, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defence of Democracies in Washington, DC.

“From Abbas’s standpoint, this is his way of both thwarting his rivals in Hamas and securing his Fatah party’s hold on the Palestinian Authority once he is gone,” Mr Rumley said.

Palestinian commentators also see the court – whose decisions would be binding on the executive, the legislature and the judiciary – as a means of bolstering presidential authority and marginalising Hamas. All nine members are either Fatah members or seen by Hamas and others as being allied with Fatah.* Reuters