In March 2023, we filed an appeal (Hebrew) against the ruling of the Appeals Court that rejected a request to grant status to three brothers, born in Jerusalem, who grew up in Israel, in boarding schools sponsored by welfare. The children, whose father is a permanent resident of Israel and mother born in the West Bank, were removed from their parents' custody due to severe domestic violence and attempted murder of the mother, as well as severe poverty and neglect after the parents' separation. Although they meet the criteria for obtaining status in Israel, their status has never been settled, partly on the grounds that they grew up in out-of-home frameworks and remain stateless.
After years of harassing the applicants by the Ministry of Interior, the Interministerial Committee on Humanitarian Affairs finally rejected their application in 2021, when they were already adults. The committee determined that the children would leave Israel for the West Bank – even though they had never been there, had no status in the West Bank and had no contact with family members there who had previously used violence against their mother. The appeals court upheld the decision.
In May of 2023, ACRI's filed another appeal (Hebrew) arguing that this was a case that included clear and extreme humanitarian concerns, which the committee and the court ignored. They further argued that the delay in processing the application for years caused the appellants damage and harmed their chances of regulating their status, and that they should not be bothered by filing another new application, but rather rectified the injustice done to them.
The District Court accepted our position and ruled (Hebrew) that the Committee did not address all the required considerations. The court ruled that given that these were children from difficult backgrounds who had been sponsored by the welfare authorities, it would have been appropriate to deal with them differently. The ruling stated that their requests for status should be brought to the committee for reconsideration and that a decision would be given on a very shortened timetable, while preserving all the arguments in their original request and addressing any new claim or document attached to their request. It was further determined that during the reconsideration of the applications, the interim injunction granting the children temporary status would remain in place.