JERUSALEM: An Israeli court upheld today the planned deportation of South Sudanese deemed to have entered Israel illegally, though government pledges of wider crackdowns on African migrants remained in question.
Rejecting a petition by human rights groups that had delayed the Interior Ministry’s April 1 deportation order, Jerusalem District Court ruled the state was not obligated to extend de facto asylum to the estimated 1,500 migrants from South Sudan.
The petitioners had not proven that deportees would face “risk to life or exposure to serious damage”, the court said, finding in favour of assessments by Israeli diplomats in South Sudan, which declared independence last year after decades of fighting with northern neighbour Sudan.
The bulk of some 60,000 Africans who have crossed into Israel through its porous desert border with Egypt are from Sudan, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation that does not recognise the Jewish state, and from war-ravaged Eritrea.
The rightist government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sees in the migrants a big economic and demographic threat to Israel’s already ethnically strained population of 7.8 million.
But while Israel says the vast majority of them came illegally to work, humanitarian agencies argue many of the Africans should be considered as refugees with asylum rights.
William Tall, Israel representative for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said the Jerusalem court’s support for the Interior Ministry’s removal of “collective protection” status for the South Sudanese appeared to be in line with the formal end of their country’s war with Sudan.
“We have been assured by the government that they (South Sudanese) still enjoy the individual opportunity to apply for asylum,” Tall told Reuters, nothing that continued territorial disputes between Khartoum and Juba may still justify refugee claims.
While the Jerusalem court case was heard, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said he had ordered immigration inspectors to start detaining the South Sudanese and prepare their deportation.
A ministry spokeswoman, Sabine Haddad, said today that there had been no round-ups yet, but that the 1,500 migrants would now be “processed” for deportation “in the near future”.
Another official said Israel had assigned 11 clerks to vet any refugee claims, many of which could be complicated by some applicants’ lack of documentation. The official predicted that processing of the South Sudanese would take several weeks.
Government officials in Juba were not immediately available for comment. Tall said that between 800 and 900 South Sudanese have voluntarily returned from Israel in recent years, despite the lack of reliable, scheduled flights between the countries.
Israel Radio quoted Yishai, who heads a party runs by rabbis in Netanyahu’s coalition, as saying he hoped today’s ruling would be “the first in a series of measures that would allow for the deportation of all citizens of Eritrea and north Sudan”.
But an official briefed on Israel’s planning said the government was “in no position to deport all of these people. Eritrea and Sudan are completely different situations.” (Reuters)