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.
The Heinrich Böll Foundation’s Israel office sponsored the Israel premiere of „The Green Wave“, Germany 2010, directed by Ali Samadi Ahadi – a renowned documentary about the uprising in Iran following the presidential elections of 2009. The premier took place at this year's Jerusalem Film Festival on July 11, 2011 where it received an honorable mention by the festival jury.
Read more about the film and the screenings which took place in Israel»
