Project background and monitoring methodology The present report is based on monitoring of trials before the Serious Crimes Court and First Instance Courts in the governorates of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The report is part of a project aimed at supporting the Palestinian judiciary’s preparedness and accountability, through increasing civil society’s capacities to monitor and evaluate the work of Palestinian courts. The project is supported and funded by UNDP/UNWomen/UNICEF joint program: Promoting the Rule of law in the State of Palestine “Sawasya II” programme. It is managed by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Project Steering committee A Steering Committee to supervise the trial monitoring program. The steering committee included (the Civil Commission for the Independence of the Judiciary and the Rule of Law (ISTIQLAL), the Independent Commission for Human Rights, the Coalition for Integrity and Accountability (AMAN), the Jerusalem Center for Legal Aid, Mada - the Palestinian Center for Development and Media Freedoms and Addameer Institute for Human Rights-Gaza. The Committee held a series of meetings to follow up on the progress of the monitoring project, approval of the required action plans needed for the implementation of the project. Project implementation steps A first step consisted in recruiting a sufficient number of court monitors to cover all the courts. The recruitment of the project staff through a competitive selection procedure advertised on ISTIQLAL’s the National Coalition for Judiciary Reform’s respective websites. In total the court monitoring team was comprised of 11 experienced lawyers (6 women and 5 men). After developing the trial monitoring forms and methodology, a series of preliminary meetings were held with official authorities in the West Bank to introduce them to the project, including the High Judicial Council’s chairman and the Courts presidents. The trial monitoring program was officially launched on April 15, 2019, at ISTIQLAL’s headquarters in Ramallah and Gaza, in the presence of representatives of the institutions involved within the framework of the National Coalition for Judicial Reform and Protection, the Judges Club Association, the Attorney General’s Office, and Sawasya II team . That same day, a preliminary meeting was held with court monitors in order to agree on a common view of the project goals and fine-tune the methodology by going through the monitoring forms. An evaluation meeting was held for the work stage after two weeks of fieldwork in which the performance was discussed and evaluated and forms were developed based on the results of the practical field work experience and the way to deal with the response options. 11