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A. J. PETROZZIELLO
and deporting pregnant and postpartum women to Haiti. Not only is this a flagrant violation of human rights
that has been denounced by various UN special procedures mandate holders (OHCHR, 2023), it also prevents
parents from obtaining a birth certificate for their baby.
Several international human rights treaties protect the right to sexual and reproductive health and impose
obligations on states parties to respect and guarantee this right without discrimination, including on grounds
of race, color, sex, language, religion, national or social origin, birth, or other status. See International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, (1966), Article 12 read with Article 2(1); Convention on the
Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (1979), Article 12 read with Article 1; International Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (1965), Article 5(e)(iv) read with Article 1;
Convention on the Rights of the Child (1989), Article 24 read with Article 2.
Tactics for making people deportable include the use of so-called voluntary return declarations, issuance of
Israeli travel documents to undocumented and de facto stateless Africans to facilitate their deportation (Kanfi,
2019), and the arrest and deportation of Israeli-born school-age children of migrants (Kraft, 2019).
The colloquial term “sabra ghost” is used to refer to the thousands of Israeli-raised, Hebrew-speaking children
of migrant workers from the Philippines, Romania, Thailand, and elsewhere who began arriving in the 1990s.
Sabra, or prickly pear, is a slang term for native Israelis, and “ghost” refers to their invisibility or nonrecognition by the Israeli state (Willen, 2005). Under pressure from civil society, in 2005 and 2010 Israel enacted
one-off naturalization schemes with stringent selection criteria to provide a humanitarian solution for about
1,000 of these children (Government of Israel, 2012). Such options have not been available for children born
to more recent African asylum seekers.
See the Joint General Comments No. 3 and No. 4 of the CMW and CRC (United Nations, 2017a, 2012,
2017b).
Interview with Nahla Haidar, vice-chairperson of the CEDAW Committee, December 14, 2021.
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Drs. Jenna Hennebry, Deirdre Brennan, and Kelly Hunter for helping to sharpen her
thinking and writing. Public graduate research funding from the province of Ontario supported the completion of
this work (Ontario Trillium Scholarship 2017–2021; Ontario Graduate Scholarship 2022–23; and the Ontario
Student Assistance Program grant).
Funding
This study was supported by Government of Ontario. The publication of this research was undertaken thanks in
part to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund.
Notes on contributor
Allison Petrozziello is Assistant Professor of Global Migration and Inequality at Toronto Metropolitan University.
She is a global governance scholar specializing in gender- and human rights-based approaches to the governance
of migration and citizenship. Dr. Petrozziello is a member of the International Network on Statelessness Scholarship,
Global PhDs on Statelessness, and supports the Global Movement against Statelessness.
ORCID
Allison J. Petrozziello
http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2976-0858
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