Hotline for Refugees and Migrants: Appeals Tribunal Adjudicator rejects Israeli Ministry of Interior’s legal opinion regarding army desertion and grounds for refugee status
Published: 13 Oct 2016
Dear Friends,
Almost two years ago, the Hotline, together with our partners at the Tel Aviv University Refugee Rights Clinic, submitted a case to the Jerusalem Appeals Tribunal on behalf of an Eritrean asylum seeker. After fleeing his country he arrived in Israel and submitted a request for asylum. The state subsequently rejected his request, stating that desertion from the Eritrean army does not constitute grounds for asylum.
We took this man’s case in 2014 because he is one of thousands of Eritreans who received rejections based on this logic. Yesterday, after almost two years of deliberation, an Appeals Tribunal Adjudicator agreed with us. The Ministry of Interior’s legal opinion that desertion from the Eritrean army does not provide grounds for refugee status is against the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.
Eritrea is a small country that produces a lot of refugees. The reasons why were made clear when the UN Human Rights Council published its second report on Eritrea just a few months ago. “Crimes against humanity have been committed in a widespread and systematic manner in Eritrean detention facilities, military training camps and other locations across the country over the past 25 years…Eritreans also continue to be subjected to indefinite national service, arbitrary detention, reprisals for the alleged conduct of family members, discrimination on religious or ethnic grounds, sexual and gender-based violence and killings.”
The Adjudicator said that army desertion can in fact provide grounds for refugee status if it is seen as a political act by that government and is penalized with severe punishment. Furthermore, after the state argued that they could not grant refugee status based on army desertion because it would be applicable to too many people, the Adjudicator specified that the state can’t refuse to apply the Refugee Convention to a group of asylum seekers making similar claims just because that group is large. “Even in the completely theoretical case in which it was found that refugee status had to be granted to all those asylum seekers, I believe this isn’t a quantity Israel is incapable of digesting.“
We are committed to building a just asylum system in Israel, even if we have to build it one court decision at a time. We hope that the Israeli authorities will study this judgment and implement it, and that people will have their day in the Israeli asylum system. We will be there to accompany them.
Reut Michaeli,
Executive Director