2 Center for Constitutional Rights officials are denied entry into Israel
Center for Constitutional Studies logo./Twitter.
Two officials with the Center for Constitutional Rights say that on Sunday they were interrogated and denied entry into Israel for a fact-finding tour with U.S. human rights leaders.
Israel denied entry to executive director Vincent Warren and board chair Katherine Franke, a Columbia University law professor on the executive committee of Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies, according to a press release. Warren and Franke were detained for 14 hours before they were deported.
Other group members were allowed entry, and were planning to visit legal-advocacy and human-rights organizations, academics and community leaders. They are tweeting about their experiences with the hashtag #JusticeDelegation.
Warren and Franke told Democracy Now that they were singled out and questioned about the plans of people in their group, but they didn’t want to divulge the information because of safety concerns about who they were visiting.
Franke said their detention began after they were already cleared through immigration and were waiting for the other delegates. “An immigration official comes out and drags the two of us back in,” Franke said. “And at that point I was interrogated for over an hour by the Israeli immigration officials.”
The officials asked Franke whether she was there to promote the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. When she said she was not there for that purpose, immigration officials accused of her of lying.
One official held up his cellphone and showed Franke a fringe website he had discovered by Googling her name. “There are these right-wing trolling sites that have all sorts of false things—that say I’m committed to the destruction of Israel, I’m anti-Semitic, I hate Jews, I want to kill Jews,” Franke said. “None of that is true. And he said, ‘See you’re lying, you’re lying to me.’ ”
Warren said he is investigating the possibility of a challenge to the decision to keep them out of Israel. In the press release, he said the Israeli government denied them entry “apparently because it feared letting in people who might challenge its policies. This is something that we should neither accept nor condone from a country that calls itself a democracy.”
