CITIZENSHIP OF MANY JORDANIAN-PALESTINIANS STILL

C O N F I D E N T I A L SECTION 01 OF 06 AMMAN 001466 SIPDIS DEPARTMENT FOR NEA/ELA AND NEA/IPA E.O. 12958: DECL: 04/30/2018 TAGS: PGOV KPAL PREF KDEM KWBG IS JO SUBJECT: CITIZENSHIP OF MANY JORDANIAN-PALESTINIANS STILL UNSETTLED 20 YEARS AFTER "DISENGAGEMENT" REF: A. 04 AMMAN 7828 ¶B. AMMAN 580 Classified By: Ambassador David Hale for reasons 1.4 (b) and (d). ¶1. (C) Summary: Twenty years after Jordan severed its legal and administrative ties to the West Bank, the repercussions are still being felt, and not merely in the central peace process assumption that the West Bank will become the core of a Palestinian state. Through vague regulations and opaque internal procedures implemented in the wake of the disengagement, the Ministry of Interior revokes the citizenship status of some Palestinian-Jordanians, typically arguing that their ties to Jordan are weak, and that their proper identity is as an unhyphenated Palestinian. Revocations can be challenged in court, but are usually upheld through appeals to "sovereignty" - an argument which the legal community finds unconvincing. In the absence of solid information from the Ministry of Interior, the scale of the issue is impossible to gauge (although some attempt to do so anyway). Attempts by civil society to change the policy behind the scenes have failed. End Summary. E Unum Pluribus -------------- ¶2. (C) In a dramatic national address on July 31, 1988, King Hussein announced Jordan's disengagement from the West Bank. Seeking to calm the fears of Palestinians living in Jordan, the King said that the disengagement would "not relate in any way to the Jordanian citizens of Palestinian origin. They all have the full rights of citizenship and all its obligations, the same as any other citizen irrespective of his origin. They are an integral part of the Jordanian state to which they belong, on whose soil they live, and in whose life they participate." Despite this reassurance, some Jordanians of Palestinian origin can find their citizenship threatened because the intent of disengagement vis-a-vis individual status remains opaque and open to interpretation. In practical terms, this means that those affected can find their access to government services, health care, and education severely restricted or cut off. Pick A Card, Any Card -------------- ¶3. (C) The regulations that implemented the disengagement gave new meaning to a pre-existing system of "cards" used to categorize different types of citizenship for Palestinian-origin Jordanians who lived in the West Bank prior to 1967. The system originally introduced in the 1980s is now used to indicate the type of citizenship and level of access to Jordanian government services, both within Jordan and without. Note: This system does not apply to 1948 refugees or former residents of Gaza, whose citizenship rights were not directly impacted by the disengagement. End Note. ¶4. (C) Yellow cards were issued to refugees from 1967 who reside permanently in Jordan. Since the West Bank was at one point administered by Jordan, yellow card holders remain full legal Jordanian citizens. They can vote, they can access the full range of Jordanian government services, they are issued full five-year validity passports, and they have a national number. ¶5. (C) Green cards are for 1967 refugees who reside permanently in the West Bank or Jerusalem. "Permanent residence" is defined by Jordanian authorities in several ways - there is a time element (where people spend most of the year),a residence element (where people own property and live),and an employment element (whether people are employed by the Palestinian Authority). Green card holders can vote, and are issued full-term passports of five years, but they do not have a Jordanian national number. They do not have full access to Jordanian government services. They require a work permit, they pay foreign tuition at Jordanian universities, and there are restrictions on land ownership. The Devil is in the Details (and the Implementation) -------------- -------------- ¶6. (C) The 1988 disengagement from the West Bank was neither codified by law nor made a Royal Decree. Instead, it was promulgated through a series of "temporary" internal regulations - a move that bypassed public debate or disclosure. What is not debated is that after the internal disengagement regulations were implemented, the MOI started to confiscate yellow cards and issue green cards in their place. Raja'i Dajani, himself of Palestinian origin, was AMMAN 00001466 002 OF 006 Interior Minister in the late 1980s and oversaw the initial drafting and implementation of new regulations governing who would remain a Jordanian citizen (among Jordanians of Palestinian origin) and who would not. The intent, he says, was to apply only to Palestinians who were then permanent residents of the West Bank. Today he believes that Jordanians of East Bank origin use the disengagement's vagueness to "regulate movement in and out of the West Bank, and to make people stay there," in a backdoor effort to reduce Palestinian presence in Jordan. ¶8. (C) While in theory a Jordanian citizen can request to change his status from yellow card to a green card, this rarely if ever happens, Dajani said. What does happen is that a yellow card holder who chooses to reside in the West Bank may find that Jordanian border officials will issue him a green card on a trip back to Jordan. Dajani lamented this practice of effectively forcing someone to relinquish his identity/citizenship, which he said not only violated Jordanian law, but international conventions as well. He claimed the General Intelligence Department and Ministry of Interior also confiscate the full-term passports of Palestinian-Jordanians who return from the Gulf on their way to the West Bank. As Dajani puts it, GID and MOI are implementing "the wrong regulations." How Citizenship is Revoked -------------- ¶9. (C) Prominent lawyer and Vice Dean of the University of Jordan law school Fayyad Al-Qudah detailed to us the process of forced conversion from yellow card to green card status. He noted that the process is not pro-active on the part of the Ministry of Interior - "they won't come to your house so they can change your citizenship status. They'll wait until you cross a border or come in to renew your passport." The ability of the Ministry to change someone's status is, according to Qudah, supposed to originate from either an in-person interview or a review of the documents needed to renew a passport or identity document. Yet in practice, reviews of citizenship status are often initiated at a border crossing. ¶10. (C) The citizenship revocation process is facilitated by electronic systems which keep track of national ID numbers and passports. Colonel Arif Washah, who is in charge of the King Hussein Bridge/Allenby crossing between Jordan and the West Bank, told Poloffs that passport officials can see whether a traveler is a yellow or green card holder when they are processed through the Interior Ministry computer system at the border. Based on their interactions with travelers and their documentation, border officials have the power to flag a case for review and refer people to the Ministry of Interior for further questioning. Washah admitted that in the absence of clear regulations, border officials take "other factors" into account and are forced to "read between the lines" when considering referral of a case to the ministry for review. ¶11. (C) Red flags that could cause a change of status include documents related to residence in the West Bank, business documents, or evidence of an official position within the Palestinian Authority - anything that could call into question a citizen's ties to Jordan. When the yellow card holder appears at the Interior Ministry, a similar document check and interview is performed to obtain further information and clarification about ties to Jordan. Mohammed Abu Baker, a PLO official in Amman and yellow card holder, told us that when he went to renew his passport, he was required to obtain a certification from the inspection office in the Interior Ministry indicating that he had never traveled to the West Bank and therefore had no ties there. ¶12. (C) If the Ministry officials feel there is adequate cause to change a cardholder's citizenship status, the person whose card is being changed must be notified in writing ("they won't just tell you over the counter," says Qudah). Once that notification is delivered, the citizen has sixty days to lodge a formal challenge. Qudah says that this sixty day period is the portion of the regulation that causes the most confusion. In several cases, the Ministry has spuriously claimed that challenges can only be filed sixty days after the decision was made inside the bureaucracy, not when the person involved was notified. There is no indication on the documents which notify cardholders of the sixty day challenge period - Qudah indicated that many people lose cases because the sixty day challenge period has lapsed, which "allows the Ministry to quash the case formally." ¶13. (C) Disputes over the validity of administrative AMMAN 00001466 003 OF 006 decisions in citizenship matters in Jordan are referred directly to the High Court of Justice - there are no intervening levels of judicial decision or appeal process. As a consequence, not every lawyer in Jordan is eligible to handle cases of alleged unlawful status conversion. Only lawyers who have been in practice for more than five years are eligible for the special Bar Association status which allows them to argue cases before the High Court of Justice. In practice, this specialization acts as a further hurdle for those who wish to challenge their status conversion - they must seek out one of the smaller cadre of lawyers who are able to argue such cases. ¶14. (C) Once the arguments and documents of the case are filed, the court serves the government with the case within one week. The case is automatically given to a special government legal office which is resident in the High Court of Justice and handles petitions filed against the government. The government then has fifteen days in which to respond, after which the case goes back to the complainant, who has seven days to file a rebuttal. After all of the paperwork is filed, the case usually appears on the court's docket and is heard within ten days. Since citizenship cases of this nature are usually relatively straightforward, Qudah told us that they typically last no longer than four months to resolve from the time the notice is issued by the Ministry of Interior. The Shield of Sovereignty -------------- ¶15. (C) There is general agreement among Jordan's legal community that a policy shift on the Palestinian citizenship question occurred in the early part of this decade. Until around the year 2000, the High Court of Justice for the most part ruled in favor of the plaintiffs when hearing cases of citizens contesting their change in status - decisions that created a long chain of established precedents. Dajani says that these rulings typically would "correct all the wrongdoings of the MOI and the Passport Department" on the assumption that administrative error rather than political maneuvering was the cause of citizenship status changes. "Then everything changed," said Dajani. "The courts started to implement the orders of the government. This is unprecedented in Jordan's legal system." ¶16. (C) Our contacts in the legal community, including lawyers at the quasi-governmental National Center for Human Rights, agree that the High Court's underlying legal reasoning in these cases is weak. The courts cite sovereignty as a shield to protect the government from criticism and further public scrutiny of citizenship revocations. As long as the courts declare the issue of citizenship to be the domain of the state rather than a right of the individual, our contacts see little room for Palestinians to effectively challenge changes to their status. According to Ali al-Dabbas, who heads the Complaints and Legal Services Unit at NCHR, when the Center takes complaints to the MOI, officials provide the same rationale. ¶17. (C) Former Interior Minister Awni Yarvas (April-November 2005, in the government of Prime Minister Adnan Badran) acknowledged this at a late February symposium sponsored by the Professional Associations entitled "Revocation of Nationality and Its Effects on the Rights and Freedoms of the Individual." Media reports of the proceedings quoted him defending the policy as an "act of sovereignty" that served to "anchor the Palestinians in their lands." He cited a ruling by the International Court of Justice that identifies citizenship as a state affair. According to Dajani, who also spoke at the symposium, Yarvas denied that there was any wrongdoing, but did not deny that there exists a policy of removing people's citizenship. Dajani told poloffs that Yarvas had been "rewarded" with his appointment as Interior Minister for effectively pushing this policy during his nine years as Director of the Civil Status and Passports Department. Is the Disengagement Unconstitutional? -------------- ¶18. (C) Qudah indicated that one of the problems lawyers who try citizenship cases face is the fact that the West Bank disengagement, though announced by the late King, was codified as series of regulations rather than as a full-fledged law. Like Dajani, Qudah and NCHR lawyer Atef Al-Majali question the legality of how the disengagement was implemented in Jordan. They suggest that if Jordan had a Constitutional Court (Ref B),it would likely strike down at least the citizenship portions of the disengagement policy as AMMAN 00001466 004 OF 006 unconstitutional both because of how it was implemented and for its content. Yet since the High Court of Justice has effectively declined to operate as a Constitutional Court, it will only issue verdicts of unconstitutional behavior in individual cases rather than striking down entire laws or regulations. As most lawyers and virtually all judges are unwilling to challenge the basic validity of the disengagement itself, the only thing left is to challenge the paperwork and the authorities behind the paperwork - a much smaller space in which to find irregularities which would work in favor of the plaintiffs. ¶19. (C) Qudah told us that while most paperwork-based cases are won by the government, some forced changes in citizenship status have been thrown out on procedural grounds. According to the law, only the Minister of Interior himself can approve changes in the status of a Jordanian citizen. In several cases that have come before the high court, defense lawyers proved that lower level bureaucrats in the ministry effectively approved citizenship status changes, or that the Minister of Interior illegally delegated his powers to lower level officials. ¶20. (C) In the hope that the trend is only temporary, or that the court will strike down previous rulings, Jordan's immigration lawyers are still bringing cases before the High Court. "They are still going to the courts, and they are still failing," Dajani says. NCHR's Majali, who has worked on citizenship cases, believes that the situation is now essentially hopeless for Palestinians who want to challenge the changes to their status before the courts. NCHR itself is bringing fewer and fewer of these cases into court, expecting that they will be lost. The Question of Scale -------------- ¶21. (C) There is a wide discrepancy among our contacts regarding the quantitative scope of citizenship revocation. Current and former government officials tend to play down the scope of the issue, while civil society activists (who often have actual contact with cases) offer higher estimates of how many people are impacted. Since the Ministry of Interior remains tight-lipped about statistics in general and the Palestinian identity issue in particular, there is no sure way of knowing which side is closer to the truth. Regardless of the scale, the issue keeps coming up, causing cyclical heartburn for the government. ¶22. (C) At the February symposium Dajani presented a paper that examined the history of the regulations, how they have been implemented improperly, and the damage they do to Jordanian national unity. Dajani estimated that since the year 2000, about 40,000 Palestinian-origin Jordanians have had their status eroded by these methods. "In the same house, some are Jordanians with full validity passports, and some are Jordanians in name only, with temporary passports. The numbers are increasing and people are complaining," Dajani asserted. ¶23. (C) Former Interior Minister Samir Habashneh, on the other hand, told us there were only "tens" of instances per year during his time in office (2003-2005). Habashneh dismisses the 40,000 number, saying, "this is not correct, and I'm an authority on this issue." During his tenure as Interior Minister and later as a Senator, Habashneh challenged Islamist lawmakers in the lower house to produce a list of names to accompany their allegation that 800 Palestinians had had their citizenships revoked as of 2004 (Ref A). Habashneh asserts that their inability or unwillingness to produce a verifiable claim proves that opposition rhetoric on the issue is exaggerated. Upping the rhetorical ante, Habashneh counters that thousands of new Palestinian-origin Jordanians born since 1988 have been granted yellow cards - a number that surely dwarfs the number of people whose citizenship has been revoked. In an April 8 interview with London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi, Interior Minister Eid Al-Fayez commented, "this issue has been discussed and commented upon exhaustively. I believe that it has also been subjected to exaggeration." ¶24. (C) Officials at the King Hussein/Allenby bridge, who are on the front lines of the citizenship revocation issue, similarly play down its scale and impact. Colonel Washah, head of the crossing, threw out a seemingly random low number - "one in a thousand" - to suggest that the impact of the policy is minimal. It was clear from talking to officials at the border the issue is sensitive. Note: Contacts who deal with citizenship revocation cases agree that the policy is driven from above, and is not a case of overzealous low-level AMMAN 00001466 005 OF 006 border functionaries. Dajani says that the policy is "orchestrated at senior levels - clerks at the border do not have this power." End Note. ¶25. (C) NCHR, for its part, was involved in advising plaintiffs in sixty-seven cases of citizenship revocation in ¶2007. NCHR's legal staff told us that this figure is not representative of the scale of the issue, however, as the commission serves only as the last resort for those whose citizenship status has been changed. They believe that the problem is much larger than even the number of cases brought before the courts, as only a fraction of revocations are challenged. The Powers That Be -------------- ¶26. (C) There are ongoing attempts by civil society activists, journalists, and other political elites to prod the government into reviewing or changing its policy. In 2007, Dajani and several other Palestinian-Jordanian notables met with the King in the hopes of reversing the general trend of government actions. According to Dajani, the King appeared surprised, and "ordered" that a commission be formed by Dajani, former Prime Minister Taher al-Masri, and GID Director Mohammad Dahabi to discuss the issue. That committee foundered when efforts to follow up with Dahabi were ignored, and Raja'i doubts the apparent snub was innocent. Note: In a subsequent meeting with Dajani, he said a committee from the professional associations was sending a letter to the King inquiring about this commission. End Note. ¶27. (C) NCHR has also attempted to go to bat for Palestinians caught in the citizenship issue. Former NCHR Chairman Shaher Bak recently told us that he went behind the scenes directly to the senior leadership of the government and security services in an attempt to get a reversal of the policy. Per Bak, that effort failed. In the absence of a policy change at the top, NCHR lawyer Ali Al-Dabbas told us that when the sixty-day statute of limitations on challenging a revocation has expired, NCHR usually tries reaching out to officials in the Ministry of Interior - in the Human Rights division - to try and reverse the decision behind the scenes. While Dabbas said that this rarely gets results, NCHR has been successful in a limited number of cases in reversing decisions even after the sixty day challenge period has run out. Creating Palestinians? -------------- ¶28. (C) Several contacts claim that one of the driving factors behind the policy of citizenship revocation by the GOJ is the desire on the part of the Palestinian leadership to bolster the numbers of Palestinians citizens. Habashneh claimed that Yasir ARAFAT had come to Amman after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s and requested that Jordan help solidify the identity of his people. Specifically, per Habashneh, he asked that everyone outside of Jordan at the time of the West Bank disengagement, everyone who works in the PLO, and everyone who works in the PA be given a green card. That said, despite Habashneh's argument that Jordanian actions in this regard serve to strengthen Palestinians, he did not deny the process can be painful and can be quite unwelcome. He said he withdrew his own cousin's Jordanian ID because she worked with the Palestinian Authority (Habashneh's mother is of Palestinian origin),which aroused her anger and consternation. Contacts have also cited examples of Palestinians in Jordan finding their identity cards revoked because one relative or another registered them with the PA. Others cited examples of members of the same immediate family finding themselves with different national identities by similar fiat. An Invisible Wall -------------- ¶29. (C) In the absence of a governmental policy shift, many Jordanians of Palestinian origin remain wary about renewing their passports and traveling abroad, lest their citizenship be called into question. Even if the number is not the tens of thousands claimed by some, it is well known in Palestinian-origin circles in Jordan that trips to the West Bank can result in effective loss of Jordanian citizenship. The PLO's refugee issue point-man in Amman, Muhammad Abu Baker, told us that "once you cross the (King Hussein) bridge, it's over. Everyone is afraid to visit now. If I visit the West Bank, they will immediately issue me a card - whether it is yellow or green is up to wasta ('connections')." Abu Baker, along with many other AMMAN 00001466 006 OF 006 Palestinians in Jordan, jealously guards his status as a Jordanian citizen. In doing so, he is unwilling to venture into the West Bank for fear of obtaining the dreaded green card - this despite the fact that he works in the Palestinian "Embassy" in Amman and would seemingly have good reason to travel there for business. Abu Baker told us that he applied for an Israeli visa several years ago in order to attend a critical meeting in the West Bank. "Thank God I didn't succeed. Jordanian authorities would have taken away my (full validity) passport," he thankfully noted. HALE