Refugees

No Safe Haven

The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants' latest report, sponsored by the Heinrich Boell Foundation, is a critical analysis of Israel's Refugee Status Determination process for Eritrean and Sudanese nationals. This report builds upon the Hotline's 2012 report, titled Until our Hearts are Completely Hardened, in which they examined at length the Refugee Status Determination process for all asylum seekers. At the time, Israel's state run apparatus for protection did not accept applications from Eritrean and Sudanese nationals. Since formally accepting their applications the state has not recognized even one Sudanese refugee, and less than a handful of Eritreans. The following report addresses how the asylum policy is being applied, the shortcomings of the state's legal interpretation of the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees as well as numerous other flaws leading to the sweeping denial of refugee claims made by asylum seekers.

Managing the Despair: Monitoring Report – Asylum Seekers at the Holot Facility April–September 2014

The Hotline for Refugees and Migrant's second monitoring report on the Holot facility covers the months of April to September 2014 in which between 2,300 asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea were held in the facility in Israel's south. The detainees, most of whom had been living in Israel for a number of years, were taken to the geographically isolated facility where they were far from the public eye. This report, published by the Hotline for Refugees and Migrants together with Physicians for Human Rights and with the support of the Heinreich Boell Foundation, is the only report of its type to document what is happening in Holot, the administrative issues faced by Holot residents and the effects of indefinite incarceration on the health and spirit of the detainees.  The report was published just prior to Israel's High Court decision (22.09.2014) to void the Anti-Infiltration Law under which the Holot facility was created. The report received extensive media coverage emphasizing that despite the government referring to Holot as an open facility, it is in effect a prison and is having a debilitating affect on detainees physical and mental health. As the Knesset is expected to legislate a new law before the end of 2014 this report will be fundamental to the Hotline's work to lobby the Knesset to take a more humane approach to asylum policy.