Law / State of Palestine

State of Palestine

privacy

The Palestinian Authority has no comprehensive personal-data-protection law. This is confirmed both by direct reading of the Authority's own Cybercrime Law (Law by Decree No. 16 of 2017, as amended), a 246,655-character text searched in full for "personal data," "privacy," and "private life," which returned exactly one hit, an evidence-seizure integrity provision, not a processing regime, and by independent secondary reporting stating plainly that a comprehensive law "is yet to be issued."

Two Amended Basic Law (2003) provisions supply general privacy rights, read directly from primary text: Article 17 (home inviolability, with a guaranteed remedy) and Article 32 (sanctity of private life, criminalized violation, guaranteed criminal and civil remedy with no statute of limitations). This corrects a derivation candidate that had cited "Article 27," which is actually a press and media freedom provision unrelated to privacy.

Article 32's remedy language is unusually strong relative to the rest of this batch: it declares any violation of "personal freedom" or "the sanctity of the private life of human beings" a crime, and guarantees both criminal and civil cases with no statute of limitations, which reads as arming a private plaintiff for a privacy violation as a constitutional matter, even though no statutory personal-data regime exists for that remedy to operate within.

The batch's West Bank/Gaza legislative-history question could not be split out within this research's budget; the secondary reporting read treats the absence of a comprehensive law as common to both territories rather than describing two distinct legislative tracks, and that is what this document carries rather than a flattened or invented distinction.

3 instruments named 1 researched in detail As of 2026-08-29

Instruments

Each one links to its LexLint note, which carries what it requires and what it flags on.

Enforcement supervision

Palestinian Basic Law (Amended 2003), Privacy and Remedy Provisions

cite Palestinian Basic Law (Amended) 2003, Arts. 17 and 32 stage IN FORCE in force since 2003-03-18 binds public and private bodies source Palestinian Basic Law reference text hosted at palestinianbasiclaw.org, the maintained reference site for the Basic Law

What it requires →

Article 17 makes homes inviolable, barring surveillance, entry, or search absent a valid judicial order, and voids any resulting consequences while entitling a person harmed by a violation to a remedy guaranteed by the National Authority.

Article 32 goes further: it declares any violation of a personal freedom or of "the sanctity of the private life of human beings" a crime, guarantees both criminal and civil cases with no statute of limitations, and obliges the National Authority to guarantee a fair remedy. Neither article establishes a lawful-basis regime, data-subject rights, a supervisory authority, or a breach-notification duty; Palestine has no comprehensive personal-data statute for these general remedies to sit within.

This corrects a derivation candidate that cited "Article 27" for privacy; that article is a press and media freedom provision.

This summary covers the instruments LexLint has researched to a stage. Instruments named in the corpus but not yet researched are counted above and are not listed here. Every entry carries its own primary source on its note page. This is a research index, not legal advice.