The naturalization of a child without citizenship whose mother is Israeli cannot be made dependent on the consent of the child’s Jordanian father, a court in Israel ruled on Sunday.

Haifa District Court President Ron Shapira ruled that the Population and Immigration Service, a wing of the Home Office, had falsely ordered that children’s Israeli citizenship be subject to their father’s consent.

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The mother of the children is Israeli and has full custody. In his ruling, Shapira stated that the law must put children’s welfare first.

In this case in particular, the father’s approval or rejection should not be a factor “in which the entirety of the information shows that the father has actually left his children and shows no interest in their situation or their future”.

Shapira criticized the agency’s attitude towards the woman and her children. “Apart from the fact that the managing authority has exceeded the protocols required by law and disregarded the basic principle of the well-being of the child, I consider the behavior of the managing authority with regard to the petitioners’ request as presented to me to be difficult.”

The difficulty, wrote Shapira, is that “the mother of the children has been trying to regulate the rights and status of children for almost 10 years”. In the meantime, the state had “delayed the processing of the petitioners ‘application and continued to request the father’s consent in accordance with the procedure, without carefully examining the petitioners’ allegations that the procedure had been misapplied in the circumstances”.

The woman was born in Israel in 1976 to an Israeli mother. At the age of 12 she moved to live with her father in the West Bank. Shortly after she was 18, she married a relative who lives in Jordan and moved in with him in 1995. She received Jordanian citizenship, as did the children she gave birth.

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In her petition against the Home Office, the woman said she divorced her husband in 2011 after he exposed her and her children to violence and other forms of abuse. She agreed to forego repayment of her dowry and maintenance payments in exchange for custody of her children. The agreement was approved by the Sharia Court in Jordan and the Sharia Court in Haifa.

Around the time of their divorce, the woman returned to Israel with her children and went to the Population and Immigration Service to apply for her children’s citizenship. Initially, the agency refused to grant legal status to the woman who was forced to take legal action in order to obtain Israeli citizenship. After doing so, the agency refused to recognize her children as Israeli citizens because they were “residents of the area” and were subject to the provisions of the Israel Entry Act, which applies to non-citizens of Israel.

The woman then turned to the Haifa District Court. Through her attorney, Ronen Shklarsh, she asked the court to order the immigration service not to make her children’s citizenship dependent on her father’s consent or objection.

The Population and Immigration Service asked the court to reject the petition. It argued that in cases like the woman’s, the Citizenship Act provided that a minor child could only be naturalized if the non-citizenship parent did not object and the other parent had custody of the child at the time. As long as it is not certain that the mother had sole custody of her minor children in terms of citizenship, the father must be given the opportunity to object.

“The petitioner has sole custody of her underage children and therefore the request to have the father’s statement appears to have no place in this case,” concluded the judge, ordering the Population and Immigration Service to pay 30,000 court costs Shekels ($ 9,300).