All news items
1 November 2011
Hundreds of Zimbabwean asylum seekers who have been left exposed to arrest and detention following the expiry of their permits are being frustrated by corrupt personnel at the Department of Home Affairs.
Zimbabwean asylum seekers
Disgruntled asylum seekers who spoke to The Zimbabwean, most of them on condition of anonymity, said such officials were working in...
1 November 2011
The International Organisation for Migration has deplored the Zimbabwe government's tendency to detain asylum seekers in prison instead of speedily handing them to UN agencies for assistance.
In a report, the IOM said it had assisted 26 Somali and 74 Ethiopian asylum seekers relocate to Tongogara Refugee Camp after they languished for months at Harare remand prison with the United Nations...
1 November 2011
Johannesburg: International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent societies (IFRC) is calling Southern African Development Community (SADC) governments put in place policies that recognize the rights of migrants and to join forces with regional humanitarian organizations to eliminated problems faced by migrants in the region. IFRC Southern Africa representative Ken Odur Friday speaking in...
1 November 2011
The department of Labour is investigating employers of farmworkers and domestic workers in Musina, Limpopo, who exploit undocumented foreign workers by offering them low wages and then blowing the whistle on them on payday.The department met with stakeholders on Thursday in Musina, where it explained that the huge number of problems afflicting migrant workers in the area meant there was an...
13 October 2011
SOUTH AFRICA yesterday deported 261 Zimbabweans who were living in that country illegally while 300 more such immigrants are expected to arrive at Beitbridge Border Post today.
This follows the expiry of the July 31 deadline for them to regularise their papers. The first batch of 261 Zimbabweans arrived here around midday yesterday in a convoy of four buses under heavy security. The...
10 October 2011
At a glance, Jabulani Sibanda is living the South African dream. At 31, he is married with two beautiful children, and has a car, a house and his own business.
But Sibanda doesn't really own much of his life because he is stateless. Despite years of trying to obtain legal documents of his citizenship and residency status, he remains undocumented. Without them, he is resigned to living...
7 October 2011
Mail and Guardian: The moratorium on deporting illegal Zimbabweans has quietly been lifted by the department of home affairs, leading to an outcry from refugee rights groups.
No deportations of Zimbabweans have taken place for almost two years while home affairs have been running the Zimbabwe documentation project (ZDP) to offer legal status to Zimbabweans living illegally in South...
6 October 2011
Luwizhi has been on a paper chase for the last four years – not as a student pursuing higher education, but as someone seeking documents while bouncing between being an asylum-seeker, migrant worker and stateless person.
Luwizhi was born in 1975 to
a Zambian father and a
Malawian mother who had
met and married in
Zimbabwe as migrant
workers decades ago. He
grew up in Zimbabwe and
had...
27 September 2011
At a time when the country was known as the “breadbasket of Africa”, hundreds of thousands of persons migrated to Zimbabwe, mostly as farm labourers from neighboring countries in Southern Africa. In the initial blush of post-independence, the Zimbabwean Constitution of 1983 acknowledged this migrant population by allowing citizenship to flow from birth on the territory to children...
23 September 2011
SA MAY not extradite suspects to a country where they might face the death penalty unless that country has given an assurance that they would not be sentenced to death, a court held yesterday. The full bench judgment of the South Gauteng High Court is a strong affirmation of the constitutional right to life and emphasises that preserving good relations with other states cannot come...