HaMoked requested the
inter-ministerial committee on humanitarian affairs, to legalize the status of a Jordanian citizen, who has been living in Jerusalem since 2000, and that of her youngest daughter. Their case is one of severe of domestic violence. The husband's refusal to arrange his wife's status in Israel forms a part of his abusive treatment of her, as is his refusal to register their daughter in the population registry.
The woman moved to Jerusalem after her marriage to the man, an East Jerusalem resident. The couple had three children, but only two of them were registered as Israeli residents. The youngest daughter, who suffers from a severe congenital disorder and requires frequent medical treatments, has been left without legal status because her father refuses to register her as a resident out of vindictiveness against her mother. The woman now lives in Israel without legal status – as a result of her husband's refusal to apply to the Interior Ministry for family unification – and is also without any official identification document, because her father-in-law, acting for her husband, keeps all of her documents in his possession.
For years she had suffered from her husband's abuse and beatings, as did her children, until a particularly vicious incident in October 2010, when she was beaten and injured by both her husband and her father-in-law. Only then did she pluck up the courage to file a police complaint against the husband. Aided by the local social services bureau, she and her children were referred to a shelter for battered women, where they remained for 6 weeks, and then moved into an apartment she rented. Due to the fact that the daughter's medical condition requires her to undergo treatment every other week, she was placed in the custody of her paternal grandparents. The mother herself cannot take her child to the hospital for her treatments, nor pay for them, having no Israeli status, no identification document, and not being allowed to work. The woman agonized over her consent to place her child in the grandfather's custody, as she knew for a fact that he habitually beats the child.
The husband was arrested, and then imprisoned, continuing all the while to send her threatening messages. Despite her legal rights, the authorities did not keep her fully updated about the judicial proceedings against her husband. She was not informed of his indictment, the judgment issued in his case or of his sentence. The woman was alarmed to learn her husband's prison release date, and hastened to apply to the Family Court to issue a temporary protective order against him under the Domestic Violence Prevention Law, fearing he would continue to harm her children and herself.
Foreign spouses of Israelis are not entitled to status in Israel independently. This is the right of the Israeli spouse, who is required to apply to the Interior Ministry for family unification. When the woman's status depends on the goodwill of her abusive partner, another link is added to the chain of violence and control in the relationship. The Interior Ministry has a procedure for dealing with a termination of a graduated procedure for status of spouses due to the Israeli spouse's violence. The procedure relates to foreign women who have already entered the graduated procedure for status in Israel, and aims to allow them to receive Israeli status on their own, independently from their violent Israeli spouse.
In this case, the woman does not meet the formal criteria of the procedure, because she had never entered the graduated procedure for family unification. However, HaMoked requests the inter-ministerial committee to acknowledge the fact that the woman meets the substantive criteria of the procedure, and that by granting her status, the Interior Ministry's objective in adopting this procedure would be satisfied. HaMoked claims that the Interior Ministry must take into account the exceptionally difficult position of the applicant, who is a battered woman and a foreign national at the same time, and who has been isolated and denied Israeli status by her husband as part of his abuse.
"The State of Israel must not contribute to a husband's violence against his wife by giving him ‘weapons’ in the form of a refusal to arrange for her status. […] The State of Israel must not collaborate with violence by demanding the wife to meet conditions which are beyond her control, and are simply a new rendition of her husband's violence against her.", wrote HaMoked in its request to the Interior Ministry.
