The UN's Sustainable Development Goal 16 in Palestine: Colonial legal foundations of the Balfour Declaration and access to justice under the British Mandate

This dissertation examines access to justice under the British Mandate in Palestine (1922–1948) through the framework of Sustainable Development Goal 16, with particular attention to Target 16.3 on equal access to justice for all. Rather than treating law as a neutral arbiter, the study asks how the Mandate’s institutional architecture shaped the practical conditions under which legal protection could be invoked. The central argument is that the constitutional framework established by the Palestine Order in Council — characterised by executive concentration of power and ordinance-based legislation — produced access to justice that was formally procedural yet substantively unequal. Land governance offers the clearest illustration of this dynamic: cadastral surveys, registration requirements, and the 1940 Land Transfers Regulations transformed property recognition into a bureaucratically mediated process in which access to enforceable rights depended on documentary literacy, financial capacity, and sustained engagement with administrative institutions. These thresholds operated within a context of political asymmetry in which Palestinian Arab representative structures were structurally weak or effectively absent, while Zionist institutions possessed far greater organisational capacity to navigate regulatory frameworks. The dissertation concludes that colonial legality functioned not primarily through explicit exclusion, but through institutional configurations that conditioned entry into the legal system itself, thereby shaping unequal access to justice in ways whose implications extended beyond the formal end of the Mandate in 1948. Working paper. Originally submitted as undergraduate dissertation, BA in Global Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, 2026. Supervisor: Marc Morató-Aragonés Ibáñez.