Investigating Digital Rights in Palestine: The Constitutional Court?s Interpretation of the Basic Law

The purpose of this project is to establish a research network among Swedish and Palestinian scholars/practitioners. This research, in a Swedish-Palestinian collaboration, aims at answering three main questions: i) what are digital rights in the Palestinian context? ii) How could the Palestinian basic law be used as an instrument to constitutionally protect digital rights? iii) What is the role of the Palestinian Supreme Constitutional Court in protecting digital rights within its main interpretative function?

The questions pay a great attention to legal and political challenges surrounding the situation in relation to sustainable development goals 5: Achieve gender equality, and 16: Build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions. This topic has not been explored at the Palestinian level yet, where an urgent need emerges to fill the gaps in knowledge and provide for a comprehensive research on constitutionalism of digital rights. In doing so, a series of workshops, discussions, applications for grants, research stays for a joint and long-term collaboration will take place.

This collaboration will be implemented in two years and will result in scientific publications. It contributes to building of scholarly capacities, conducting proper examination of digital rights protection at the constitutional level, and learning from identified best practice on the subject. The project has a great potential in contributing to the Swedish policy for sustainability in Palestine.