life, including intellectuals, religious leaders and businessmen". 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 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 PASSIA. Individual elected members of the PLC representing Hamas, however, are automatically members of the PNC. The representative status of the PLO has often been challenged in the past. 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. PLO versus PA The 1993–1995 Oslo Accords deliberately detached the Palestinian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories from the PLO and the Palestinians in exile by creating a Palestinian Authority (PA) for the Territories. A separate parliament and government were established. Mahmoud Abbas was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords. Although many in the PLO opposed the Oslo Agreements, the executive committee and the Central Council approved the Accords. It marked the beginning of the PLO's decline, as the PA came to replace the PLO as the prime Palestinian political institution. Political factions within the PLO that had opposed the Oslo process were marginalized. The PLO managed to overcome the separation by uniting the power in PLO and PA in one individual, Yasser Arafat. In 2002, Arafat held the functions of Chairman of the PLO/Executive Committee; Chairman of Fatah, the dominating faction within the PLO; as well as President of the Palestinian National Authority. He also controlled the