Following the hearing of the petitions against the reenacted Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law: The High Court of Justice instructs the State to consider mitigations to the Law

On April 25, 2022, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), HaMoked: Center for the Defence of the Individual and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-Israel) petitioned the High Court of Justice (HCJ) to revoke the Citizenship and Entry into Israel Law (Temporary Order) of March 2022. The organizations argued that the Law is racist and brands all Palestinians as a security threat to prevent them from obtaining family-unification-based residency status in Israel. The petitioners also argued that the Law violates a range of basic rights of those who have been allowed to stay in Israel and have become over time de facto residents of the State – with particular harm to women victims of domestic abuse and children who grow up with no status in Israel. The petitioners stressed that during the Knesset deliberations on reenacting the Law, its initiators and also government jurists acknowledged that the Law had a demographic purpose rather than a strictly security purpose as Israel had claimed time and again.

In the response on behalf of the Government of November 13, 2022, it was argued that all the petitions against the Law that were joined under a single proceeding, including HaMoked’s petition, should be dismissed, given that the Law “in its current version is constitutional”, that its only purpose is security and that it constitutes a “temporary law that is not designed to shape a demographic reality”. It was also claimed that although the Law violates Israeli spouses’ constitutional right to equality, the resultant harm was for the worthy purpose of security, and that it also “meets all the other tests of the limitation clause” of Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty. The Government also claimed the Law was proportionate, among other things, “given new mitigating arrangements incorporated into it… “, among them the possibility of receiving an upgrade to permanent residency in the case of “spouses who are residents of the Area [i.e., the West Bank] 50 years of age or older who have been in possession of a [military stay] permit for at least five years”. In the Knesset’s response to the petition, submitted the same day, similar arguments appeared as well as the claim that insofar as the Law violated the constitutional rights of residents of the Area living in Israel pursuant to military stay permits, the matter should be reviewed in the framework of legal proceedings relating to the administrative-operative aspect of the Law.

Following the hearing held on December 4, 2022, the Court instructed the State to submit a notice within 90 days regarding its willingness to alter the Law’s definition of “Resident of the Area”; to include same-sex partners in the category of “permit to spouses”; expand the possibility to grant temporary residency also to women age 40 and older; and also to explain the need for the annual quota established in the Law for humanitarian requests for status.