In the media
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27 March 2015
The Citizen
The Supreme Court of Appeal has severely criticised Home Affairs for ignoring repeated court orders and gave the department until 1 July to reopen the refugee reception office (RRO) in Port Elizabeth.
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27 March 2015
Bloomberg
It took Getachew Eriro four months to make his way from Ethiopia to a South African township and open a little shop selling bread, sweets and canned fish.
It took just a few minutes to lose it all when a mob of more than 50 residents broke in two months ago, ripping through the roof to steal his stock and trash the store. He says it was because he’s an immigrant.
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25 March 2015
Mail & Guardian
The municipality agreed to establish a township next to Plastic View, but this would be only for those who qualified for low-cost housing.
In a case that is likely to grapple with the questions of how cash-strapped municipalities should allocate land for low-cost housing, a group of residents in Pretoria East has managed to temporarily halt the auctioning off of the land on which they live.
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24 March 2015
Pretoria News
Tuesday’s auction of the City of Tshwane’s land parcels may proceed as planned, but without Woodlane Village, the so-called Plastic View informal settlement.
Lawyers for Human Rights, on behalf of residents, successfully obtained an urgent High Court order against the Tshwane municipality on Monday afternoon.
Judge Legodi Phatudi found that auctioning off the property without a plan to relocate nearly 3 000 people living there would cause them irreparable harm.
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23 March 2015
The Citizen
The High Court in Pretoria will rule later today if it should stop the Tshwane Municipality from selling off municipal land, including the notorious Plastic View informal settlement in the East of Pretoria, on a public auction.
Plastic View, also known as Woodlane Village, is amongst the over 70 municipal properties destined to be sold in auction on Tuesday morning. Today Lawyers for Human Rights, which represents the Plastic View Community, argued that the community had no prior knowledge of the planned sale, in which they clearly had an interest.
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20 March 2015
Unisa Radio
You may need: Adobe Flash Player. LHR's Kayan Leung was invited to discuss human rights in South Africa in commemoration of Human Rights Day.
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12 March 2015
The Times
In a precedent-setting case, the Pretoria High Court has given asylum seekers the right to challenge a fine imposed on them.
The court yesterday heard an urgent application by Janvier Mutoshiwa, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who with the help of Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) asked the court to compel the Department of Home Affairs to allow him to contest his fine.
Up until yesterday the department did not give refugees or asylum seekers the right to approach a competent court to contest a fine.
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5 March 2015
Eyewitness News
Lawyers for Human Rights have urged the National Department of Health to ensure that staff at all hospitals are properly trained on the law around foreign nationals who need treatment in South Africa.
It’s made the appeal after officials at the Tambo Memorial Hospital in Boksburg turned away a woman in need of urgent medical care, allegedly because she's a foreigner.
Eyewitness News revealed last week that the heavily pregnant woman was also told by hospital staff that she would not be helped unless she paid an upfront amount of R10,000.
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3 March 2015
Energy FM
You may need: Adobe Flash Player. LHR's Kayan Leung discusses issues around access to healthcare for foreign nationals in South Africa.
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24 February 2015
The Times
“The back of a police van is the only place that feels like home.”
This is the plight of a young man, Singejeje Adel, who has no family and no country that regards him as theirs. He is stateless.
Adel, 23, was born in a refugee camp in Tanzania in 1992 and has never been recognised as a citizen of any country. His mother, his only known relative, died when he was 10 and left him with no documentation to prove his identity.
When he arrived in South Africa at the age of 16 he was quickly picked up by police for not having any documentation.
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