14 Introduction The Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) has since 1995 endeavored, in its annual report, to address the situation of human rights in Palestine. The purpose behind this was not only to monitor and uncover any violations committed by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) but to develop as well a general trend in Palestinian society that would reject human rights violations and would accordingly seek to draw the attention of the Palestinian authorities to the necessity of reviewing all policies and legislations which do not comply with human rights standards and would also work on putting an end to all practices which contradict them. We hope in this report to provide a more comprehensive view of the conditions of human rights in Palestine during the year 2010 in accordance with the diversity of areas covered and cared for by ICHR, in particular the Commission’s constant interest in shedding light on the most prominent patterns of violations. Additionally, ICHR has worked hard with the Palestinian official institutions so as to find the means which would fully attend to these violations and would further consolidate the principle of the rule of law, and would maintain and respect the system of Rights and Freedoms mentioned in the second chapter of the Palestinian Basic Law and in International Conventions of Human Rights. According to the methodology adopted in this report, we divide our discussion and examination of the situation of human rights in the PNA into three sections: the first section tracks the major political findings or data which report the conditions of human rights in Palestine and what accompanies the inactivity of the Palestinian Legislative Council, in addition to monitoring the major violations in the system of rights and freedoms during the year 2010 and their implications. In the second part of the first section, ICHR analyses the impact of Israeli violations on the performance of the Palestinian National Authority and its ability to provide all means to enforce the various rights. In the second part of the first section, entitled “Rights and Freedoms”, the report makes note of the alarming rise in the violations of basic rights as a result of the prevailing political division between Fatah and Hamas and the harsh measures taken by the two governments in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The report significantly notes the continuous violations of the right to life by issuing and executing death sentences against five citizens, and how the civil and military courts in the Gaza Strip issued fifteen death penalties without ensuring fair trials. The report also observes a considerable rise in the violation of the right to physical safety and personal security, in addition to a rise in the number of abusive arrests, especially of all those suspected of belonging to one of the two opposite or conflicting parties, and then arresting them for long periods, and bringing them to military rather than to civil courts. In addition, the report states how the security agencies continued their policies of either refusing to enforce the courts’ decisions or delaying their enforcement.