By Palestine Chronicle Staff
Vincent Warren, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and Katherine Franke, chair of CCR’s board and Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University, were both deported to New York on April 29 after being interrogated for 14 hours at Ben Gurion International Airport and denied entry into Israel.
Detained and Then Deported: U.S. Human Rights Lawyers Barred from Entry into Israel https://t.co/AHLK94H8fl #JusticeDelegation pic.twitter.com/TUYWPVwBxv
— Democracy Now! (@democracynow) May 2, 2018
The two activists were members of an American human rights delegation to Israel and the West Bank. The rest of the “Justice Delegation” was allowed in.
The wall segregating the West Bank. Palestinians face restriction of movement, discrimination, less-than status as a matter of daily life. #JusticeDelegation pic.twitter.com/Din84M9lER
— tara houska (@zhaabowekwe) May 2, 2018
Sabine Haddad, Israel’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority (PIBA) spokesperson, told +972 that Franke was barred entry because of her affiliation with the BDS Movement and Warren because he ‘lied’ about the reason for his trip.
#Israel set to enforce anti-BDS entry law and not allow people who support BDS activity into the country #BDSFail https://t.co/S55l9LPNqx pic.twitter.com/dufQCrapcO
— Adam Milstein (@AdamMilstein) July 7, 2017
These episodes became increasingly frequent after the implementation of the Israeli Anti-BDS travel ban, allowing the interior minister to deny entry to Israel to foreign nationals who “knowingly issued a public call to boycott the State of Israel,” “pledged to participate in said boycott” or acted on behalf of a group or an organization that have done so.
(PalestineChronicle.com)
