| Israeli Interior Ministry Continues to “Stonewall” on Crucial Question of Lost Jerusalem Residency Rights Last year, after extensive correspondence between the Alternative Information Center and the Israeli Ministry of the Interior, in which the former attempted to obtain official data concerning the number of Palestinian Jerusalemites who have been deprived of their residency rights - and after the repeated refusals of the Interior Ministry to divulge the information, the AIC filed a petition in the High Court asking the court to order the Ministry to make the information public. The right of the public to obtain information on the activities of governmental bodies has been recognized by courts in Israel on numerous occasions. The AIC was joined by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and by Yishai Menuhin (on behalf of the Coalition for Freedom of Information) as co-petitioners. The petition also asked for disclosure for information on other issues, such as the number of family reunification applications granted in Jerusalem. In an apparent attempt to convince the petitioners to withdraw their petition, on May 6, 1996, the Ministry released new information concerning family reunification in Jerusalem. [see below] However, it refused to release information on the matter of lost residency rights, maybe due to the sensitivity of this issue in the light of the current ID card confiscations.
Specifically, the AIC had asked to know: the total number of East Jerusalem residents who have lost their status as “permanent residents of Israel” since 1968; from among the total, the number of those who are staying in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the number who lost their residency rights after traveling abroad; the number of those who have lost their residency rights who applied for the return of their Jerusalem ID cards - and the number of such applications which were approved.
The state-attorney’s office, in explaining its refusal to divulge the requested information, stated: ”With regard to some of the inquiries no statistical data exists and with regard to others - the data is partial ... The registry lists within the collection of computerized registries, with regard to the subjects about which information is requested, are not complete and therefore it is not at present possible to conduct a statistical examination using our computers.”
“Subtracted” Residents
The petitioners are quite skeptical regarding this claim, to say the least. It is known that the Interior Ministry has kept computerized files on Jerusalem residents for at least the past 15 years - and that one of the categories in these files concerns residents who have been “subtracted”. This refers to Jerusalem residents who have been removed from the Jerusalem population registry not through death or by moving to another locality within the State of Israel, but by administrative decision. The names of “subtracted” residents are not actually removed from the computer files, but specially marked. Thus, it should be quite easy for the Ministry to count the number of Palestinian Jerusalemites who have lost their residency rights. But they still insist on “stonewalling” regarding the disclosure of this information. The petitioners have decided to continue with procedures in the High Court until full disclosure is obtained. |
