Personal Info
- Country of residence: Palestine
Information
Ahmad Hosni Ali Al-Ashqar was born in Tulkarm on November 9, 1980. He is married and has three children. He completed his primary and secondary education in Tulkarm schools, graduating from Ihsan Samara High School in 1998 with a high school diploma in the humanities. He earned a bachelor's degree in public law from An-Najah National University in 2003, a master's degree in public law from Birzeit University in 2010, and a doctorate in public law from Hassan II University in Casablanca, Morocco, in 2017. He worked as a legal advisor to the Supreme Judicial Council between 2004 and 2011, as a judge in the Palestinian Supreme Judicial Council in Ramallah in 2011, and as a criminal judge in the Jenin Magistrate's Court in 2014.
He joined the Fatah movement since he was a university student, and was active in the Fatah Youth Movement, the student wing of the Fatah movement, inside An-Najah University. He was a member of the student council at the university in 2000 and 2003, and served as rapporteur of the membership committee in the movement office of the Union of Palestinian Writers and Authors. He was active in the Fatah movement’s commission for Arab and Chinese relations between (2005-2011).
During his time as a judge, he was active in several judicial and research institutions, including: Head of the Judicial Research and Studies Center at the Supreme Judicial Council between (2010-2014), Chairman of the Board of Directors of the Palestinian Judicial Observatory Association between (2013-2015), Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Palestinian Judges Club, and a member of its Board of Directors since 2015, and President of the Arab Judges Union since 2018.
Al-Ashqar became known for issuing a number of controversial judicial rulings. In 2013, he acquitted three young men who had thrown explosive devices at the settlements of Ofra and Beit El, near Ramallah. He argued that referring them as defendants before a Palestinian court constituted an infringement on the Palestinian people's right to legitimate resistance, a right guaranteed by international law and UN General Assembly resolutions. He maintained that the existence of an authority administering Palestinian affairs in the territories occupied in 1967 did not negate the Palestinian people's right to armed struggle. Following this ruling, he was transferred from Ramallah to the Jenin Magistrate's Court. In 2014, he issued another ruling stating that the Oslo Accords were not applicable. The ruling argued that the Oslo Accords were considered expired because they were a limited-term agreement of only five years. In this ruling, he asserted that Palestinian courts had jurisdiction to try Israelis, and that the legal protocol attached to the Oslo Accords, which prohibited the trial of Israelis in Palestinian courts, infringed upon the sovereignty of the Palestinian people over their land and violated the principle of territoriality of criminal law. Two days after this decision, the head of the Supreme Judicial Council transferred Al-Ashqar from a criminal judge to an execution judge, which sparked widespread protests among human rights activists and broad sectors of the Palestinian people rejecting Al-Ashqar’s punishment. He also issued several decisions rejecting political arrests, and during his judicial career, he did not issue any decision to detain any defendant on political grounds or for freedom of opinion and expression. Rather, he issued several decisions to refer cases to the Constitutional Court on suspicion of violating Palestinian laws regarding public rights and freedoms.
Al-Ashqar wrote many articles criticizing human rights violations in Palestine, including the ban on union work, the restriction of freedom of opinion and expression through the Cybercrime Law, and torture in prisons. He also criticized the issuance of dozens of decrees by law, and he was referred for investigation by the Supreme Judicial Council.
Al-Ashqar has published numerous studies and books with international and local organizations, including: “A Guide to Judicial Training on the Application of International Human Rights Conventions” (2016), “Arab Judicial Interpretations in the Application of International Human Rights Conventions,” “Judicial Protection of Public Rights and Freedoms: Between Theory and Practice” (2013), “A Training Guide in the Application of International Standards for Fair Trial Guarantees” (Raoul Wallenberg Institute Publications, 2018), and “The Justifications for Repealing Article 308 of the Palestinian Penal Code” (2018). He has also published several poetry collections, including “Prayers in the Temple of Sorrow” (1998) and “The Pangs of Emptiness” (2007).
Al-Ashqar believes that the national struggle is going through a historical turning point aimed at undermining the rights of the Palestinian people and liquidating their cause. This necessitates restructuring the collective Palestinian consciousness towards mobilizing energies to confront the threats and restructuring the patterns of national struggle to revive the Palestine Liberation Organization on participatory foundations, and formulating a liberation project that emerges from the Oslo cage towards more effective and influential spaces.
It is believed that resistance is a legitimate right of the Palestinian people, including armed resistance, and no agreement can negate this right enshrined in international covenants. National consensus must be reached on the forms of resistance, its priorities, and its spatial and temporal scope. Achieving political partnership is considered a national duty based on enshrining this partnership in a national charter that places Palestinian constants in the position of supreme constitutional value, and promotes political pluralism as a means of expressing the will of the Palestinian people. It is believed that the division is a severe stab in the side of the homeland, and it is a fictitious conflict over fictitious power, and this division must be ended and its management stopped.
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