Human rights groups and refugee organizations sharply criticized the Justice Minister on Monday for signing a new regulation stipulating that litigants cannot file civil court documents without providing an Israeli ID or a foreign passport number. The Justice Minister, Yaakov Neeman officially signed the regulation last week. It will come into force on September 1, and rights groups say it will mostly affect Palestinians, refugees and migrants who are stateless and do not hold any passport. Attorney Sari Bashi, executive director of Gisha, a human rights group that advocates freedom of movement for Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, slammed the regulation as draconian.

“The regulation raises concerns that the people who need access to the courts the most are prevented from seeking judicial address,” Bashi told “The Jerusalem Post” on Monday. “This is very worrying for the Israeli justice system.” The regulation will affect tens of thousands of Palestinians who do not have a passport issued by the Palestinian Authority or a foreign passport, Bashi said. Michael Alexander of the African Refugee Development Center in Tel Aviv, said that the new regulation was dismaying. “The directive will remove the last channel of recourse to justice for thousands of asylum seekers who are the weakest, most vulnerable population in Israel today,” Alexander said. “Israel cannot remain a signatory to the International Refugee Convention while violating basic rights of the Convention, such as the right to a fair court hearing. The right to appeal to a court of justice is is a universal human right, not a privilege for citizens only,” he added.
Alexander said that African migrants are increasingly victims of hate crimes, and needed to have access to the courts. The new regulation will only apply to civil suits, including family law cases. It will not apply to suits filed in the High Court of Justice, administrative affairs courts or labor courts, meaning that Palestinians and refugees will still be able to file proceedings in those courts.

Attorney Oded Feller from the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), who wrote to Neeman on the issue, said that the right to file legal proceedings was a basic right in the Israeli legal system, and that this right is also anchored on the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees and the Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons. According to “Haaretz”, because the protests, the Justice Ministry will reexamine the wording of new regulations it has issued barring individuals without a passport or ID card from filing lawsuits in Israeli courts.  Head of the Justice Ministry’s Legal Counsel Department, Dr. Peretz Segal, replied yesterday that court clerks currently register legal documents that do not bear a plaintiff’s ID number. This could lead to malfunctions and difficulties in carrying out court rulings on the part of the Enforcement and Collection Authority, Passport Control and other state authorities, he wrote.

Peretz said the regulations are basically “technical” and intended “to compel plaintiffs who have an ID number to note this important, fundamental detail in the documents they file to the court so the authorities can carry out the courts’ ruling vis-a-vis the right person.”  Feller said “technical matters become fundamental when they specify explicitly who will not be able to file claims in court.” He said the new regulations forbid court clerks from receiving claims from people without a passport or ID card. “We call on the justice minister to stipulate in the regulations that those who don’t have an ID or passport may open court procedures,” he said.