Re: 43/2023

Date: 01 August 2023

On Monday, 31 July 2023, the Women’s Rights Unit at the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) organized a panel discussion on “Challenges of Palestinian Maintenance Fund” as part of the advocacy campaign: “Alimony is My Right”. The meeting was attended by representatives of the Palestinian Maintenance Fund (PMF), governmental bodies, civil society organizations (CSOs) working in women and child rights.

Samah Ashour, lawyer at the Women’s Unit, opened the panel discussion and welcomed the attendees, indicating that this workshop comes as part of the activities of the advocacy campaign “Alimony is My Right”. Ashour emphasized that this campaign aims at empowering and helping women to benefit from the alimony payments codified in law. She added that the idea of this campaign came through the work of the Women’s Unit in representing women before Sharia courts for more than 25 years, during which the Unit has monitored the negative impacts on women and children, as these women have obtained rulings to obtain their alimony, yet they cannot get any of these payments, jeopardizing their human dignity. This problem has encouraged the Unit to hold a panel discussion with the PMF to discuss its role and the challenges facing its work.

Mr. Osama Abu Shanab, Director of the Palestinian Maintenance Fund, made an intervention and reviewed the PMF’s mission in ensuring the implementation of the alimony ruling that cannot be executed for many reasons such as, the absence of the person convicted, his domicile is unknown, lack of money needed to execute the ruling or any other reason. Abu Shanab also addressed PMF’s current resources and the criteria for applying as well as the number of beneficiaries. He also talked about the problems PMF faces during its work, including insufficient personnel, as PMF does not have a legal officer to refer to those convicted of the alimony payments that PMF has disbursed, alleviating PMF’s financial crisis. On the other hand, PMF suffers from weak revenues based only on the revenues of the Sharia courts; a fee of 5 JODs for each marriage contract or divorce certificate, and a fee of 1 JOD for validation of marriage contracts. Therefore, the resources are insufficient compared to the aspirations expected from PMF. There are also high risks of investing PMF’s funds in light of the poor economic situation in the Gaza Strip. Abu Shanab added that the law does not limit the disbursement of alimony payments to certain number of years; thus, PMF continues to disburse the wife’s alimony as long as there is a marital relationship, and continues to disburse alimony for male children until they turn 18, and may extend to 22 years old if there are university tuition fees for the child, and for female children until they get married. Thus, PMF calls for intensifying efforts to ensure PMF’s continuous role in disbursing alimony for the affected women and children to preserve their human dignity.

At the end of the workshop, there was a considerable discussion where the attendees commended PCHR’s role in shedding light on this problem that is addressed for the first time. The workshop concluded the following recommendations:

1. The need to raise women’s awareness of the PMF’s role so that eligible women would know they can benefit from it.
2. The need to intensify efforts to put pressure on the Government in the Gaza Strip to increase the PMF revenues.
3. Continuously holding Meetings between civil society and PMF to discuss the ways possible to collect funds and grants for the PMF as this is one of its sources according to Article 10 of the PMF Law no. 6/2005.
4. The need to hire a legal officer to refer to the persons sentenced to pay alimony payments that the PMF has already disbursed so that it would alleviate the PMF’s financial burdens.
5. Exploring the possibility of applying the financial resources of the Road Accidents Compensation Fund on the PMF.