 |
|
African asylum seekers demonstrated outside
Israel's parliament in December 2013
to protest the government's policy of
indefinitely detaining them.
Photo: Shahar Shoam/IRIN
|
TEL AVIV/JOHANNESBURG, 27 February 2014 (IRIN) - Israel has released
figures showing that the number of African migrants choosing to accept
“voluntary departure” from the country has been steadily increasing since an
amendment to its anti-infiltration law was passed in December 2013, with about
2,200 departures recorded since the beginning of 2014.
However, the voluntariness of the procedure has been called into
question by migrant rights organizations and the migrants themselves. According
to the amended law, the alternative to accepting voluntary departure can be
indefinite detention in a new “open” facility, known as Holot, in Israel’s
southern Negev Desert. Besides the threat of detention, the government is offering
a grant of US$3,500 to those who agree to voluntary departure. The government
recently increased the amount of the grant from $1,500.
[…]
The amended law reduced the time that irregular migrants can be
detained from three years to one, but allows for the indefinite detention of
asylum seekers who cannot be deported. Of the 53,000 asylum seekers currently
living in Israel, according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the majority are
from Eritrea (36,000) and Sudan (14,000), both countries they cannot be deported
to, according to international refugee law, due to the likelihood that they
would be subjected to persecution upon their return.
Israel is a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention but has one of
the lowest refugee recognition rates in the world, having granted refugee
status to only about 200 asylum seekers in the last 60 years. Until 2012,
Israel did not permit Eritrean and Sudanese citizens to submit individual
asylum requests but instead granted them collective temporary protection – an
unstable status with very limited rights.
[…]
One option reportedly being offered to Eritrean and Sudanese asylum
seekers is removal to Uganda, a country that officials are claiming has agreed
to accept asylum seekers from Israel. However, the Ugandan government has
denied the existence of such an agreement, and there have been several reports
that migrants who agreed to leave Israel for Uganda were deported soon after
their arrival.
“A lot of people are agreeing to this deal, but when you get to
Uganda, there is no deal,” said Meron Estefanos, an Eritrean journalist and
human rights activist based in Sweden who is in regular contact with Eritrean
asylum seekers in Israel. “I know someone who signed the deal, and once he
reached Uganda, [they] deported him to Egypt, who deported him back to Eritrea.
On his arrival, he was detained for 10 months. With the help of relatives, he
escaped and made it to Sudan.”
