All news items
12 December 2014
Refugee advocates in South Africa have reacted with dismay and scepticism to a planned revamp of the asylum application process which the government says is designed to distinguish economic migrants from people with a bona fide case for refugee status.
"The granting of asylum should not be contingent on an applicant's skills, economic circumstances, employment history or number of...
12 December 2014
A middleman in the 1999 multi-billion rand arms procurement deal on Thursday told the Seriti Commission of Inquiry he failed to understand why he had been called to testify.
“Why am I here?” Fana Hlongwana asked the commission.
He said he did not understand why there was an issue over the funds, assumed to be millions, he was paid when he acted as a consultant for then defence...
Keynote address by Zwelinzima Vavi, Cosatu General Secretary, to the World Social Forum on Migration
8 December 2014
It is especially appropriate that this very important discussion in migration is happening here in Africa, and on a very special date, a year to the day since we lost our great liberator and leader, Comrade Nelson Mandela. There could be no finer role model for this gathering to follow. He, better than anyone, showed us how to resolve difficult and complex challenges, bringing people together,...
8 December 2014
South African police fired rubber bullets to disperse protesters who blocked a highway with rocks and tires near Ivanhoe Mines Ltd. (IVN)’s Platreef project to demonstrate against plans to start building the $1.6 billion platinum mine.
Some members of the local community are opposed to the approval of a license that allows billionaire Robert Friedland’s Ivanhoe to develop Platreef....
2 December 2014
In 2010, Tiwonge Chimbalanga, a transgender woman, was imprisoned in Malawi for getting engaged to a man. Pardoned and freed, she now lives in exile in South Africa. Mark Gevisser reports on an uneasy triumph for the global LGBT rights movement
“Gays Engage!”
This was the headline on the front page of Malawi’s Nation newspaper, on 28 December 2009, beneath a photograph of...
28 November 2014
Ethiopian refugee Badesa Fokora has died in a Johannesburg hospital after suffering double kidney failure and being refused treatment for it, despite the fact that he had been lying in a hospital bed for a month. Although doctors at Helen Joseph Hospital in Johannesburg were aware of his life-threatening condition, they refused him treatment on the basis that he was not a South Africa...
28 November 2014
Lack of mattresses, a leaking roof, lack of hot water and insufficient access to medical treatment: Pollsmoor’s facility for awaiting trial prisoners has been slammed by civil society organisations for what they call “several concerns regarding conditions of detention at the facility.”
The Visitors Committee for Pollsmoor, the Treatment Action Campaign, Sonke Gender...
25 November 2014
Potentially life-saving treatment came too late for a 27-year-old Ethiopian refugee to South Africa, who was due to ask the high court on Tuesday to force health authorities to give him dialysis.
Badesa Fokora died shortly before Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR) could fight the system on his behalf.
Fokora had been refused dialysis at the Helen Joseph Hospital – he did not qualify for a...
25 November 2014
Lawyers For Human Rights says it's outraged at a law that prevented a foreign national who's a refugee in the country, from receiving life-saving medical treatment.
The organisation will have to withdraw it's urgent application on the North Gauteng High Court on Tuesday morning, after their client, 27-year-old Ethiopian refugee, Badesa Fokora, died while waiting for the matter...
19 November 2014
On 17 November 2014, the Sowetan issued an apology for misrepresenting facts and wrongfully attributing quotes to LHR and MIACC [our client].