Israel secretly expelled 1,000 Sudanese: report

Source : Al Akhbar English

Israel has secretly repatriated more than 1,000 Sudanese immigrants over the past several months in violation of a UN charter on refugees, Haaretz reported Tuesday.

The refugees were likely to face persecution upon their return to Sudan, which has issued stern warning to its citizens against visiting Israel, the newspaper said, citing official sources.

Israeli officials said the immigrants, who were in detention prior to their expulsion, had voluntarily agreed to be deported. But the UN High Commissioner on Refugees rejected that claim, saying that there is no “free will from inside a prison,” according to the Haaretz report.

The report also cited Michael Bavli, the UNHCR’s top representative in Israel, as warning immigration authorities that “deporting Sudanese to Sudan would be the gravest violation possible of the convention that Israel has signed – a crime never before committed.”

He was referring to the 1951 Refugee Convention which prohibits the repatriation of refugees to a country where they could face persecution.

The convention states:

Sudanese officials have repeatedly warned its citizens against travelling to Israel. The Haaretz report said that Sudan’s interior minister in 2007 said any Sudanese who took up residence in Israel “would be punished.”

Tensions between the two countries escalated last October after Israeli jets bombed a factory near Sudan’s capital Khartoum, killing two.

Israel’s interior minister had previously threatened to deport undocumented Sudanese following a wave of arrests of African immigrants last June.

"Infiltrators from Sudan have until October 15 to leave Israel, after which … they will be placed in detention," Minister Eli Yishai said in a statement last August. He added that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had approved the expulsions.

(Al-Akhbar)