In a report published on Tuesday, Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Israel of illegally expelling almost 7,000 East African refugees to their home countries where they face persecution. The report says that some returning Sudanese have faced torture, arbitrary detention and charges of treason at the hands of the anti-
Israeli Sudanese government, while returning Eritreans also risk harassment. "Israeli and international law obliges Israel to end its coercion policy, especially through indefinite detention, which exposes returning Eritreans and Sudanese to a risk of persecution or other serious harm back home," said Gerry Simpson, the report's author. Israeli authorities have labeled Eritreans and Sudanese a "threat," branded them "infiltrators" and denied them Access to fair asylum procedures."
Israeli officials say they want to make the lives of 'infiltrators' so miserable that they leave Israel, and then claim people are returning home of their own free will," Simpson wrote. In response to the HRW report, a spokeswoman for Israel's population and migration authority defended its policy as "proportionate," and said the numbers of those leaving voluntarily had increased threefold since 2013.
For the past several years, Israel has been placing thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese migrants in detention centers in the Negev desert. The U.N. says there are some 53,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Israel, most of who entered via the desert border with Egypt. Of that number, some 36,000 come from Eritrea, where the regime has been repeatedly accused of widespread human rights abuses, and 14,000 are from conflict-ridden Sudan. In 2012, Israel deported 3,920 African immigrants. With the completion of a hi-tech fence along the border with Egypt in 2013, the number of asylum seekers decreased dramatically.
