Israel bars many Palestinians from traveling abroad on "security grounds". For years, the residents of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) had no way of knowing beforehand whether the soldiers at the Allenby Bridge border crossing – the only departure route Israel allows for West Bank residents – would permit them to travel abroad. Only following
a joint petition by HaMoked, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR) and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), did the military establish a mechanism purported to allow would-be travelers to discover whether they are "banned from exit".
Under the new mechanism, meant to improve the situation, persons seeking advance inquiry must personally arrive at the local District Coordination Office (DCO). The High Court of Justice
(HCJ) approved the mechanism, provided that the military gives the applicants a response on the spot.
Following the formulation of the procedure in June 2010, HaMoked was repeatedly contacted by people who had arrived at the Allenby Bridge crossing with a DCO notice affirming no travel ban stood against them, but were made to turn back by the soldiers, on the grounds that they were banned from travel.
In March 2011,
after repeated demands by HaMoked that the military examine and solve the issue, and after its conduct was expressly criticized by the court, the military attempted to solve the problem by formulating a new procedure for handling advance inquiry requests on exit bans. However, not unexpectedly, rather than amend the system shown to be defective, the military placed the burden of its flawed system onto those who need to use the procedure. Under
the new procedure, only persons whom the DCO computer system lists as banned from exit receive a reply on the spot, the rest have to return to the DCO four working days later to receive the reply.
HaMoked appealed to the military to demand that it revoke this revision, which so blatantly deviates from its HCJ undertaking, and act to rationalize the procedure, rather than "hassle" the applicants further. Receiving no substantive response,
HaMoked and ACRI petitioned the HCJ.
On April 18, the
HCJ rejected the petition and imposed costs on the petitioners. The court ruled that the military's revised procedure eliminated the occurrence of erroneous replies and added that under the revised procedure, the process – which, in the court's view, serves a relatively small number of people in any event – is only extended by four working days, therefore, there is no need for the court to intervene with the military's decision. This ruling ignores the fact that the revision contradicts the state's undertaking – endorsed by the court – whereby the inquiry procedure should be a one stage process.
Furthermore, the justices considered the petitioners' assertion that the procedure concerns hundreds of thousands of people as somewhat misleading, given the state's data which indicated that each year, about 200-250 people used the procedure. With this, the justices ignored the fact that the procedure is expressly meant to serve
all of the hundreds of thousands of West Bank residents who wish to travel abroad, who have no other way of knowing beforehand if they are banned from travel abroad. If anything, the low number of applicants under the procedure is an indication of its failure, its inaccessibility and cumbersomeness.
It seems that in this case, the military has been permitted to choose the easier path, regardless of its harm to human rights, to modify the procedure to suit its own convenience at the expense of OPT residents' time.
