February 01, 2010 - 15:13
Jordan criticized for stripping Palestinian rights

By Dale Gavlak, Associated Press Writer

AMMAN, Jordan

A U.S.-based human rights group criticized Jordan Monday for stripping the citizenship of nearly 3,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin in recent years.

Nearly half the kingdom's 6 million people are of Palestinian origin and Jordan fears that if Palestinians become the majority, it will disrupt the delicate demographic balance. Those concerns have been heightened by some Israeli hard-liners who argue that neighboring Jordan should become the Palestinian state and that more West Bank Palestinians should be pushed into Jordan.

Palestinians want to establish an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip with east Jerusalem as their capital.

Concerned about increasing numbers of Palestinians in the country, Jordan in 2004 began revoking citizenship from Palestinians who do not have the Israeli permits that are necessary to reside in the West Bank.

Human Rights Watch said Jordan stripped about 2,700 Jordanians of Palestinian origin of their citizenship between 2004 and 2008 and urged them to restore their full rights. The trend continued last year, the group said in a report released in the Jordanian capital, Amman.

The Jordanian measure rendered the Palestinians "stateless," depriving them of passports, voting rights, education, travel, health care and jobs, said Christoph Wilcke, HRW researcher on Jordan.

"Jordan is playing politics with the basic rights of thousands of its citizens," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch.

Jordanian officials denied any wrongdoing.

Jordan ruled the West Bank and east Jerusalem from 1950 until 1967, when Israel seized the territories in war. In 1988, Jordan renounced all claims to the West Bank. Most of Jordan's Palestinians fled successive Arab-Israeli conflicts since 1948. But there is no clear breakdown on how many Palestinians come from the West Bank.

Wilcke said there is "no part of Jordan's law that allows the Interior Ministry to withdraw nationality by imposing new conditions," such as having Israeli-issued residency permits for the West Bank.

Those permits are extremely difficult to obtain, given Israel's restrictive policies on granting residency rights to Palestinians, Wilcke added.

Interior Ministry spokesman Karim Naber claimed Jordan did not revoke anyone's citizenship but "only suspended" giving social security numbers "pending reunification of families" in the West Bank.

Most Palestinians hesitate to take their cases to the courts, fearing legal steps would only finalize their loss of Jordanian citizenship, Wilcke said.

A few Palestinian Jordanians have had their citizenship reinstated, often with help from the royal court, Wilcke added, but provide no definitive figure.

Defending the measure, Interior Minister Nayef al-Qadi recently said the government wants Jordanians of Palestinian origin to clarify their status by renewing permits that recognize them as West Bank citizens in order to preserve their Palestinian identity.

Wilcke warned others could be at risk from a similar measure, such as 250,000 Jordanians of Palestinian origin expelled by Kuwait during the 1991 Gulf War.