How to reshape Palestinian courts

Nakhleh Abu Eid sold some land to Hanna Murrah. Mr. Murrah was angry because, as it turned out, he wasn't allowed to build on the land he had bought: It was too close to an Israeli road crossing the West Bank.

A heated dispute ensued. One day, while the two men were arguing about the deal, Murrah picked up a screwdriver and stabbed Mr. Abu Eid in the hand.

A 2-1/2 year court battle ensued, bringing them no closer to resolving their differences. So the men decided to go the old-fashioned route: turning to a unofficial reconciler who brokers a sulha, a sort of micro-peace between the two parties.

Now they're ready to make amends.

But for Palestinian reformers, that's not the model of justice they want.

The Palestinian people have a court system that has long left them in limbo. It's cobbled together from a mix of traditional methods, borrowings from neighboring Egypt and Jordan, which ruled the West Bank and Gaza Strip until Israel occupied them in the 1967 war - as well as a smattering of British and Turkish law. More recently, secretive state security courts with little accountability have made justice an even cloudier affair.

Today, however, as part of the US-backed democratic reform program, a modern, unified court system is getting a push as part of the Bush administration's road map for Middle East peace last year.

Results so far seem mixed. Some reformers say that state security courts, personal influence, and dismissal of cases after a sulha are all things of the past.

"A sulha will reduce the punishment, but it does not set the man free," says Yousef Nasrallah, the young chief prosecutor of the Bethlehem district court.

In traditional Palestinian society, even a murderer can make amends if the family of the victim and the family of the perpetrator get together for a sulha. Apologies and gifts of cash and livestock are offered to the aggrieved family, who then withdraw their complaint.

But now, the courts are no longer letting the sulha be the last word.

"We have many crimes that call for capital punishment, for example. If the family of the victim decides to

forgive the person, instead of capital punishment, we'll give life in prison," says Mr. Nasrallah, speaking fluent English and wearing a stylish pinstripe suit with a blue silk tie.

In the hallway outside, a man shouts out names of cases to be heard this morning at the Bethlehem courthouse, recently renovated and computerized with funds from USAID.

"There is the private right for justice, but there is also a public right," he continues. "We can't release every accused criminal just because there's been a sulha."

Despite persistent Israeli-Palestinian violence since the start of the new intifada three years ago and the increasing uncertainty of the prospects for the emergence of a Palestinian state - according to the US timetable - by 2004, Palestinian officials say some reforms are progressing.

Yet some matters appear to be taking turns for the worse.

This January will mark a decade since Yasser Arafat left Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis and was allowed into the West Bank and Gaza Strip as part of the Oslo Accords. His nascent Palestinian Authority inherited a chaotic legal system: the West Bank's laws were based on Jordan's, and Gaza's were based on Egypt's - the two countries which ruled those territories before 1967.

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