ISTIQLAL believes that if the judges were to start a practice of commencing hearings on time (e.g. at nine in the morning sharp) all these parties will be accustomed to being present on time as well. In any case, ISTIQLAL recalls that the judge is the authority responsible for managing the trial and ensuring that hearings start in a timely fashion. Judges should lead by example and, where appropriate, resort to available legal provisions to ensure that other parties adhere to the court timetables as well. b) Compliance with daily case schedule Respecting the order and sequence of files and cases in First Instance Courts varied greatly, from very high-compliance courts such as Tulkarm, Bethlehem and Hebron, where in over 85% of cases Courts adhered to the schedule, to courts in Jenin and Qalqilya, where the compliance rate was a mere 10,5%. On average, first instance TABLE 5 - COURTS’ COMPLIANCE RATE WITH DAILY courts in Gaza performed much CASE SCHEDULE (%) worse than those in the West Ramallah First instance Court 67,5 Bank (30,5% vs. 65.7% compliance rate). Bethlehem First instance Court 85,3 Hebron First instance Court 86,3 Nablus First instance Court 33,3 Tulkarm First instance Court 94,3 Jenin First instance Court 10,5 Qalqilya First instance Court 10,5 Jericho First instance Court 37,5 First instance Courts West Bank 65,7 Gaza First instance Court 27,4 Khan Yunis First instance Court 33,2 The way courts draw up their daily schedule varied from court to court. The Jenin First Instance Court was among those who performed the worst in this regard: this court often failed to hear cases at the scheduled time and to hear them according to the predefined order. In the Gaza First Instance Court, ISTIQLAL observed that files and criminal cases are often heard in First Instance Courts Gaza Strip 30,5 this court without a predefined First Instance Courts combined 55,0 sequence: it appeared that judges heard cases in Serious Crimes Court 75,2 accordance with the requests of defence attorneys; this meant in certain cases judges favoured lawyers who were known to them. This prevented an orderly examination of the hearings due to take place on a given day and gave the impression that the Court favoured certain lawyers over others. Similar concerning practices were observed in the Jericho Court of First Instance: in this court, the order of the hearing was often changed and/or disregarded; judges mostly gave priority to cases involving detainees and decided the order in which to hear the remaining cases according to the requests by the defence attorneys. On average, the Serious Crimes Court performed better than First Instance Courts, adhering to the case sequence in 75% of monitored hearings. 23