Adalah, ACRI: Cancel law authorizing court to OK Interior Min.'s requests to revoke citizenship for 'breach of loyalty'
Adalah – The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) submitted arguments on behalf of Mr. Alaa Zayoud to the Haifa District Court on 22 December 2016 asking the court to reject Interior Minister Aryeh Deri's request to revoke his citizenship. The human rights organizations also demanded the cancellation of an amendment to Israel's Citizenship Law that authorizes the court to approve requests from the interior minister to revoke the citizenship of Israeli citizens for "breach of loyalty" – an amendment that is being applied in a discriminatory manner against Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel.
Zayoud is a Palestinian citizen of Israel from the town of Umm el-Fahem who was sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges related to an attempted murder. If his citizenship is revoked, Zayoud will become stateless as neither the interior minister nor the attorney general provided an alternative citizenship status for him, in contrary to the provisions of the Israeli Citizenship Law as well as the requirements of international human rights law.
Adalah Attorney Sawsan Zaher and ACRI Attorney Oded Feller emphasized that moves to revoke citizenship currently proceeding solely against Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel suggest selective and discriminatory enforcement of the law.
The attorneys referenced a number of serious incidents in which Israeli Jewish citizens attacked Arab citizens following the enactment of the 2008 amendment to the law that have not resulted in any requests for revocation of citizenship status.
"The fact that this authority has never been employed against [Israeli] Jewish citizens who have carried out similar – or even more serious – security crimes testifies to the influence of outside considerations, arbitrariness, and to discrimination… A minister who chooses to employ such moves only against Arab citizens, in an effort to serve his own narrow political interests, drags the court into his discriminatory struggle against Arab citizens and, by doing so, stains the court."
In 1996, the Israeli Supreme Court rejected a request to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Jewish citizen Yigal Amir, who assassinated then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. In that case, the Supreme Court ruled that the criminal justice system is the accepted method by which Israeli society expresses its reservations against criminal violations, stating that "society has expressed its reservation about this brutal murder, but that is no reason to revoke Amir’s citizenship, not because of the killer’s dignity, but because of the dignity of that right [to citizenship]."
In their arguments to the Haifa court, Attorneys Zaher and Feller also emphasized the unconstitutionality of the amendment to Israel's Citizenship Law.
"This clause allows for the revocation of the most important right of all due to acts for which an individual is judged, convicted, and even serves a prison sentence."
The revocation of citizenship has grave consequences given that the right to citizenship is the basis for other constitutional rights, including the right to political participation and socio-economic rights. Such a move therefore would result in the violation of the other rights that are guaranteed by the right to citizenship.
International law explicitly and unequivocally opposes the revocation of citizenship, as established in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, and the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which Israel signed in 1961.
Adalah and ACRI therefore ask the court to reject Interior Minister Deri's request to revoke Zayoud's citizenship, and demand the cancellation of the 2008 amendment to Israel's Citizenship Law.
Case Citation: Administrative Petition 57857-05-16, Interior Minister v. Alaa Zayoud (Haifa District Court) (case pending)
