Following HaMoked’s petition and a 33-year bureaucratic struggle: permanent residency granted to a Palestinian man in his late forties who lived his entire life in East Jerusalem
Due to the Ministry of Interior’s (MOI) foot-dragging in handling residency status applications of children born to Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem, it is not uncommon for the processing time of such applications to span years and even decades. During this time, applicants are forced to live without legal status or basic rights, in constant uncertainty that severely undermines their ability to lead a normal life. In severe displays of systemic indifference, errors made by the MOI are not corrected but rather perpetuated over the years and later used as a “reasonable” justification for rejecting additional applications Such errors are neither isolated nor accidental. They stem from systemic failures in the MOI’s handling of status applications. For many years, the Ministry did not publish its procedures for the registration of children. In fact, until HaMoked’s petition in AP 727/06 Nofal et al. v. The Minister of the Interior (May 22, 2011), these procedures were never formally regulated. This situation, combined with the reported chaos at the Population Authority offices and the lack of physical accessibility to them, made it extremely difficult for parents to navigate the complex and frequently changing bureaucratic processes required to regularize their children’s status.
This entry is original published by Hamoked.
