Attempts by the Palestinian Authority to arrest Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) member Najat Abu Bakr for statements she made alleging corruption by a government minister have ignited a discussion about defamation being a crime and calls for its decriminalization.

Majed Arruri, a media rights expert from Ramallah, told Al-Monitor, “Defamation in both its written [libel] or spoken forms [slander] is a tangible issue that doesn’t require [criminal] investigation and, therefore, there is no need to hold someone in jail awaiting the results of an investigation.” He believes Palestinian legislation needs to be enacted to eliminate imprisonment in cases involving defamation.

Arruri said that by criminalizing defamation, instead of classifying it as a civil matter, the Palestinian government is not using pretrial detention for the purpose of investigating unknown components of a case, but is instead using it as punishment. “Imprisoning journalists or others for what they have said becomes a restriction on their freedom of expression, therefore resulting in self-censorship,” he noted.

The problem is compounded when the issue at hand is of public interest and when the aggrieved party is a government official or the government itself, which through the executive branch can arrest and imprison a citizen pending trial rather than as a result of a court decision. Arruri said that the executive branch's repeated use of this detention power makes it necessary for the Palestinian legislature to pass a law decriminalizing defamation.