The criminal responsibility of heads of state in Palestinian legislation

Abstract

The president, as the highest authority in the state, enjoys a constitutional legal status that the laws of different countries worked hard to put, which are constitutional laws that determine how anyone should reach the president position, his powers, cases and the reasons for ending his presidential service, the procedures for moving the political responsibility if there is a scope for applying it, as well as his criminal and penal status towards the national judicial authorities in the event of being accused of committing a common law crime. Constitutional Criminal status benefiting the president towards the national judicial authorities is different from one state to another. This depends on the nature of the prevailing political system in each country, where in the monarchies principle, the king has an absolute immunity of moving the political and criminal responsibility, as it is not possible to question the king because of errors in governance. Likewise, the judicial and penal authorities do not have the right to go after him whatever the gravity of the crimes attributed to him. However, the constitutional jurisprudence position did not give much attention to the issue of immunities and constitutional privileges, criminal responsibility of the rulers, as it considered the criminal responsibility of the president of no importance and it is just an impossible hypothesis to be applied. This explains to a large extent, the ambiguity and the inaccuracy of criminal status that the president enjoys in the comparative constitutional laws. Nevertheless, the modern international judicial practice in fighting against the impunity of presidents and its direct effects on the international and constitutional immunity base has quickly introduced the legal status of the presidents in the heart of the legal twists and showed that the constitutional criminal status of the presidents is tainted by ambiguity and heterogeneity in addition to the expiration of its provisions that are not consistent with the contemporary developments in modern law