AMMAN — A round-up of Palestinian economic policies and local and international laws at an international expert conference revealed that legislative and  

AMMAN — A round-up of Palestinian economic policies and local and international laws at an international expert conference revealed that legislative and developmental efforts are not forward-thinking, Mudar Kassis, director of the Birzeit University Institute of Law, said at the conference's closing today.
The existing legal and developmental framework is designed "to manage the occupation rather than decolonise. It's crisis management," Kassis said.

Adequate state-building should first "decolonise" by developing the educational system and establishing industry and advanced agricultural systems, Kassis indicated.

The "real question is about the day after," Kassis said. To think that one day Palestinians could wake up liberalised is a nice dream, and "it would be really bad if the realisation of a nice dream turns into a nightmare" because Palestinians are unprepared.

According to the institute's director, the outcome of the "Legal Aspects of Economic Development in Palestine" conference proved that legal and economic issues need further contextualisation and should address the real needs and aspirations of the Palestinian people.

"Who's actually attending to the needs of the constituencies? This is the missing thing," Kassis told the conference. "The self-determination factor" — the most important factor according to Kassis "is really not dealt with when we talk about policies."

However, Adrien Wing, a law professor at the University of Iowa in the US and a presenter at the conference, thought discussing the technicalities of post-occupation laws was in fact a "form of concretising self-determination — and concretising issues that, one day, the state of Palestine will have to deal with."

She recognised, however, that most of that discussion was "a theoretical exercise because the PA [Palestinian Authority] is not really in a position to do anything in a concrete way that we might suggest to them."

In his opening remarks at the conference Saturday, Palestinian Planning Minister Ghassan Khatib also pointed out the limits to what could be done, so long as Palestine remains "a satellite economy for the Israeli economy."

But the "unilateral pullout from Gaza poses new challenges," especially legally, he said. Gaza and the West Bank must be unified and their legal frameworks coordinated.

Experts from Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Switzerland and the United States spoke at the conference that consisted of six sessions organised around various sub-topics of economic development.

Some of the papers presented at the conference will be published in the Palestine Yearbook of International Law.

The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Foundation (KAS) and Birzeit University's Institute of Law, together with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, hosted the conference in the KAS Amman Office under the patronage of Planning and International Cooperation Minister Suheir Al-Ali and her counterpart Khatib.