Israel Considers Appeal of Iraqis Seeking Asylum

Israel’s High Court of Justice is considering the appeal of 31 Iraqis seeking temporary asylum here.

At a hearing last week, the state argued that some of the Iraqis posed a security threat and asked that they all be kept in jail until could be deported.

The hearing was expected to be the final one on the fate of the Iraqis, who were jailed after sneaking into Israel across the Jordanian border. Some have been in prison for as long as two years. U.N. officials said most of the Iraquis fled Iraq in search of a better economic life, leaving families behind.

A lawyer representing the Iraquis said fleeing to Israel makes it impossible for them to return home.

“The fact they chose Israel as a place of asylum automatically converted them into traitors who can be prosecuted by Iraq,” said Zvi Reich, a lawyer for the Association for Civil Rights in Israel.

In January 1994, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin established a special commission composed of security and government officials to consider the Iraquis’ plight.

A government brief filed with the Supreme Court said the special commission found that six of the detainees committed unspecified “subversive acts” and recommended that they be imprisoned until they are deported.

Some of the other prisoners, according to the government brief, pose a “lesser danger,” but should be detained for an unspecified time in order to allow security officials to do a throughout background check on them.

According to the state’s court papers, the government suggested an Arab country to which they could be deported.

But Rabin ordered the name of the country kept secret, nothing that “publication of this country’s name may disrupt the actual deportation and could hurt the security of Israel and its foreign relations.”