Editing Palestine Liberation Organization (section)

===Challenged representation===
As of 2015, there have not been elections for many years, neither for the PNC, nor for the EC, the PCC or the [[President of the State of Palestine]]. The executive committee has formally 18 members, including its chairman, but in past years many vacant seats in the Executive remained empty. Moreover, [[Hamas]], the largest representative of the inhabitants of the Palestinian Territories alongside [[Fatah]], is not represented in the PLO at all. The results of the [[2006 Palestinian legislative election|last parliamentary elections for the PLC]], held in the Territories in 2006, with Hamas as the big winner while not even a member of the PLO, "underlined the clear lack of a popular mandate by the PLO leadership", according to [[Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs|PASSIA]].<ref name=passia_plo-vs-pa>[http://www.passia.org/images/meetings/2014/oct/28/PA-PLO2.pdf ''PLO vs. PA''] {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160304102228/http://www.passia.org/images/meetings/2014/oct/28/PA-PLO2.pdf|date=4 March 2016}}, p. 9. Passia, September 2014</ref> Individual elected members of the [[Palestinian Legislative Council|PLC]] representing Hamas, however, are automatically members of the PNC.

The representative status of the PLO has often been challenged in the past.<ref name=masri/> It was for example doubted in 2011 by a group of Palestinian lawyers, jurists and legal scholars, due to lack of elections. They questioned the PLO's legitimacy to alter the status and role of the Organization in respect of their status within the UN. They demanded immediate and direct elections to the Palestine National Council to ″activate representative PLO institutions in order to preserve, consolidate, and strengthen the effective legal representation of the Palestinian people as a whole″, before changing the status within the UN.<ref name=maan-2011/>