Last update - 00:00 26/12/2006
Knesset committee favors asylum for Sudanese refugees
By Ruth Sinai, Haaretz Correspondents
Israel appears to be set to allow some of the Sudanese refugees who entered the country illegally this year to remain here, officials involved in the matter have said.
One possibility is that 12 of the families fleeing genocide in Darfur - including 25 children, out of 280 Sudanese refugees in Israel - be granted legal status.
The Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers called on the government on Monday to give the refugees legal standing. Committee chairman MK Ran Cohen (Meretz) plans to submit the request in writing to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In addition, officials from the foreign, justice, defense and public security ministries are discussing what to do with the refugees, most of whom are being held in custody.
Miki Bavli, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees representative in Israel, said all the Sudanese in Israel were considered refugees, because they were likely to be harmed for seeking refuge here. Bavli added that Israel has thus far refused to let them stay because they come from an enemy country - even though Israel is a signatory to an international treaty requiring it to grant legal status to refugees. The UN refugee agency has been making an effort to find refuge for the Sudanese in various countries, including Australia and the United States.
Some of the Sudanese refugees appeared at Monday's Knesset committee meeting, and one directly addressed MK Sara Marom Shalev (Pensioners'), a Holocaust survivor. "I turn to you as someone who fled genocide," he said. "My relatives were killed before my eyes and you want to deport us to Sudan?"
Prof. Yehuda Bauer, a historian and academic adviser at the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem, told the committee that it would be a crime to send the refugees to another country.
However, Yossi Edelstein, who heads the enforcement department in the Interior Ministry, said he is concerned that if the Sudanese refugees already in Israel are granted legal status, the country will be flooded by many of the 3 million refugees now in Egypt.