‘Israel forces asylum seekers from Sudan, Eritrea to leave’: HRW

Israel has coerced about 7,000 Sudanese and Eritrean asylum seekers to leave the country during the last 18 months. Some have been tortured, and charged with treason upon their return. According to a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) released on Tuesday, the East-African asylum seekers have been denied access to fair and efficient asylum procedures, and were detained unlawfully. During the past eight years, Israeli authorities have employed various measures to encourage the asylum seekers to leave. They include “indefinite detention, obstacles to accessing Israel’s asylum system, the rejection of 99.9% of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum claims, ambiguous policies on being allowed to work, and severely restricted access to healthcare”, the report states. Israel tightened up its restrictive asylum policy since December last year to put pressure on the approximately 50,000 African asylum seekers to leave the country. It says its policies on illegal immigrants and refugees comply with international law, insisting that the Africans are not asylum seekers, but economic migrants. In September 2013, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that a 2012 amendment to an anti-infiltration law, which allowed for the indefinite detention of people for illegal entry, was unlawful. In response, the Israeli parliament passed another amendment to the law in December that established the Holot facility in the remote Negev desert for the “infiltrators”. Hundreds of Eritreans and Sudanese have since been ordered to report to the centre, where they live in conditions that breach international law on arbitrary detention, according to the HRW report. Treason Seven Sudanese sent home from Israel told HRW they were detained and interrogated on return to Khartoum. One was tortured, another put in solitary confinement, and a third was charged with treason for visiting Israel, regarded as an enemy of the state. “They beat me with big sticks and poured boiling water over me and gave me electric shocks,” a 36-year-old Sudanese man from Darfur, who was arrested at Khartoum airport on arrival from Israel, told HRW. Agents of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS) “shouted abuses at me, saying I was against the government, because I was from Darfur and had been to Israel.” He was held for four months before being charged with treason. Under Sudanese law, Sudanese who visit an enemy state may be sentenced to ten years in prison. “Eritreans and Sudanese are left with no choice but lifelong detention in Israel or returning to a country where they risk persecution or other serious harm,” HRW concludes. File photo: Hundreds of Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers are housed in the Holot facility in Israel’s Negev desert (AP)