العربية
HE
العربية
HE
The Bill establishes that the Interior Minister not issue visas or residency permits to people who are present in Israel without legal permission, unless he stipulates they leave the country for a lengthy "cooling period" determined by the length of their presence in Israel without legal permission. The official reason for the Bill is the need to create a legislative tool for eliminating the phenomenon of illegal aliens in the country. In practice, the Bill is a cynical immigration policy which Israel is seeking to promote while denying the Interior Minister's discretion regarding issuing visas and residency permits to people who are present in Israel but have no status in it. This policy is particularly destructive when it comes to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem.
Under Interior Ministry policy, a person without status who is married to an East Jerusalemite has to fulfill two conditions in order to be granted a permit to remain in Israel. The first is that the resident spouse proves that he actually lives in Jerusalem and not merely registered as a resident of the city. The other is that the couple prove their family life is genuine. The same conditions hold true for granting status to the children of couples where one spouse is a resident and the other is not. The combination of these two demands creates a situation where the non-resident's illegal presence in Israel is, in fact, a condition for approval of a family unification application. This vicious circle is a direct product of the Interior Ministry's refusal to issue a permit to remain in Israel prior to a person's actually living in Israel. In other words: if you have not been present in Israel illegally you will never be able to be present in Israel legally.
Ironically, in so doing, the Bill seeks to create a reality where Palestinians who are present in Israel without a permit and are married to East Jerusalemites will never be able to receive permanent residency. This is so because Palestinian spouses who have no status in Israel or their children will never be able to prove that they live in Israel if they live abroad for long periods of time.
The proposed Law is intended to bypass the High Court of Justice (HCJ). The bill seeks to bypass case law which has been entrenched in two important HCJ judgments. These judgments established that the Interior Ministry's policy according to which the foreign spouse of an Israeli citizen who had been present in Israel without a permit must be deported until his application to receive status in Israel is reviewed is an unacceptable policy.
The current Bill denies the Interior Minister's discretion and compels him to condition issuance of permits and visas to people who are illegally present in the country upon their exiting it for a protracted period of time. This provision explicitly contradicts rulings of the HCJ on this issue, according to which the Interior Minister's discretion regarding removal from the country must not be denied and that the Minister could abstain from removing someone from the country by way of giving them a permit to remain in Israel.
Finally, it must be noted that the Bill explicitly contradicts Israeli constitutional law and international law in that it seeks to disproportionately breach the constitutional right to family life – a right to which everyone is entitled in a democratic regime and therefore, the Knesset would be wise to reject this Bill out of hand.
