Foundations of civil and political rights in Israel and the occupied territories
Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2001 in the subject
Law - Comparative Legal Systems, Comparative Law, grade: Sehr Gut,
University of Vienna, 321 entries in the bibliography, language:
English, abstract: This work intends to show how civil and
political rights in Israel and the Occupied Territories are
regulated, which normative standards and spiritual sources nourish
them, and how written and unwritten principles are applied and
interpreted by the Supreme Court of Israel in pursuance of its
self-imposed duty to safeguard the individual's rights and
freedoms.The legal system of Israel reflects unresolved conflicts,
ambiguities of the state and difficulties connected with the
process of nation-building as well as dilemmas concerning the
ethnic and cultural identity of the population. From 1517 until
1917 Palestine was ruled by the Turks as part of the Ottoman
Empire.In 1917 British troops conquered the territory and in 1922
the League of Nations granted to Great Britain the Mandate over
Palestine. Following the establishment of the state of Israel in
Palestine on 14 May 1948 a large number of British mandatory
legislation was absorbed into Israel's legal system. This had
and still has far-reaching, restrictive implications for the areas
of administrative law and the field of human rights and
freedoms.The British mandatory legislation includes security
legislation - such as the Defence (Emergency) Regulations, 1945 -
which empowers military commanders as well as the entirely
executive branch of the government to impose severe restrictions on
fundamental rights and freedoms.Despite the enactment of two basic
laws on human rights in 1992 many areas, such as personal freedom,
freedom of speech and the right of association and assembly are
still regulated mainly by British colonial legislation that was
never revoked after the establishment of the state of Israel.Since
1948 a permanent state of emergency is in force in Israel. This
entitles the government to apply the inherited British mandatory
security legislation as well as the own, by the Israeli parliament
enacted emergency regulations. Israel's legal system has been
built upon the duality of secular and religious law - a concept
that was inherited from the Ottoman Millet tradition, first by the
British mandatory government and then by the state of Israel.This
study also includes important laws and Supreme Court judgments
concerning civil and political rights that relate directly or
indirectly to the territories occupied by Israel in the course of
the war in June 1967.
