Some readers of this blog must have experience of trying to get a work permit in a foreign country. I’ve had to do this myself on a number of occasions and it usually involved a dreadful amount of bureaucracy and no small number of arbitrary and incomprehensible decisions. Like most people in this situation it never occurred to me that because I’m a decent bloke and had the best of intentions towards my host country that I had some sort of right to a work permit. I knew that it was up to the country concerned to decide on what basis it wanted to let me enter its territory, if it wanted to let me in at all.

I say this in the context of this story by our old friend Juan Miguel Muñoz. He seems to think that one particular country, Israel, is under an obligation to issue a work permit, rather than a tourist visa, to all who want one with the sole requirement that the person concerned be associated with an NGO that claims to defend human rights, and he expresses outrage that such permits are not being issued with the generosity that they apparently once were.

Now I have no doubt that that the Israeli Ministry of the Interior is making any number of stupid and self-defeating decisions with regard to the issuing of visas and work permits. However, as part of the government of a sovereign state - note that word “sovereign” - it’s perfectly entitled to do so.

Instead of bleating about the normal exercise of state prerogatives what Muñoz should be doing is examining cases where the Ministry of the Interior has abused its powers and, to be fair, he does a little of this at the end of the story when he mentions the worrying case of Jared Maslin, an American journalist deported from Israel after eight days in detention. Lisa Goldman has the full story here.

That’s not to say that anyone calling themselves a journalist should automatically get a big hug and a permanent work permit but democratic states should be very slow to restrict the rights of reporters to go about their lawful business. That’s because states, even democratic ones, have certain dangerous tendencies towards the rights of individuals and journalists - even the most ill-intentioned and unscrupulous ones - help citizens place limits on those tendencies.