Israel illegally coerced African migrants to leave, rights group says

Israel has illegally coerced almost 7,000 African migrants into returning to their home countries, where some face persecution, Human Rights Watch said Tuesday. “Israel’s convoluted legal rules thwart Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers’ attempts to secure protection under Israeli and international law,” New York-based HRW said in a statement accompanying an 83-page report. The authorities in the Jewish state had “denied them access to fair and efficient asylum procedures, and used the resulting insecure legal status as a pretext to unlawfully detain or threaten to detain them indefinitely, coercing thousands into leaving.” Human rights groups have strongly condemned Israel for its immigration policy and treatment of African asylum seekers, particularly over its Holot detention centre where illegal immigrants can be held for up to a year.

International law is clear that when Israel threatens Eritreans and Sudanese with lifelong detention, they aren’t freely deciding to leave Israel and risk harm back home.

Gerry Simpson, Human Rights Watch report author

"Israeli officials say they want to make the lives of ‘infiltrators’ so miserable that they leave Israel, and then claim people are returning home of their own free will," the report’s author Gerry Simpson wrote. Some of those returning to Sudan have faced "torture, arbitrary detention, and treason charges for setting foot in Israel," the report said. In response to the HRW report, a spokeswoman for Israel’s population and migration authority defended its policy as "proportionate" and said the numbers of those leaving voluntarily had increased threefold since 2013.

Middle East