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| By Ruth Sinai | "Haaretz", February 07, 2003 |
For The Record
To the pimps, smugglers and white slavers who abuse women brought to Israel to become prostitutes, we must add another group of experts in humiliation: diplomats and other officials. They enter the picture after a foreign national is arrested and incarcerated ahead of her deportation. Since the flesh merchants have robbed her not only of her honor, but of her passport as well, she is forced to obtain transit papers from her country's embassy so that she can return home. So it comes about, for example, that the consul-general of Moldova, whose country exports large numbers of indigent women, writes in the transit certificate that he gives these women, "Deported due to illegal presence in the country. Engaged in prostitution in Israel."
"That is cruel and unnecessary ... and will generate interrogations as soon as the women land [in their home country], which many of them fear," attorney Naomi Levenkron, from the Hotline for Migrant Workers, an agency that assists foreign workers, wrote to Matti Cohen, head of the consular section of the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem. Levenkron asked Cohen to try to persuade Moldova and other Eastern European countries to desist from this custom. Cohen did not reply to the letter, but the Foreign Ministry stated in response that "transit documents are the property of the state that issues them and therefore they are entitled to do with them as they wish."
Similarly, in its documents, the administrative court that acts as a review level for deportation orders also notes the occupation in Israel of the women who are being deported. The transcript of the hearing that the court holds for the women before they are deported states that they were "arrested for illegal presence and prostitution." Being illegally present in the country is against the law, but prostitution isn't.
"As you do not note in the transcript that a [male] foreign worker was arrested for engaging in construction work, I would ask that you also stop noting that these women engaged in prostitution," Levenkron wrote to the court.
