All news items
23 January 2012
Asylum-seekers entering South Africa are no longer being issued with the necessary documents to apply for refugee status. Without a so-called section 23 permit, they are being turned away from Refugee Reception Offices (RROs) and denied the opportunity to legalize their stay in the country.
“We keep coming back here but they won’t help us without those papers,” said Abdul, a...
12 January 2012
The Constitutional Court has ruled that parents of children who have been removed from their care by the state will now have access to an automatic review of that decision.
Child rights advocates say this will help fill a "lacuna" or loophole in the Children's Act that has in the past made it difficult for disenfranchised families to challenge state officials who have wrongfully...
22 December 2011
The Constitutional Court is to be asked to shed some legal certainty on the question whether our government can deport “undesirable” people facing a possible death penalty if sent back to the country from which they fled. Home Affairs will ask the court to review a Johannesburg High Court order which earlier this year ruled that the minister of home affairs may not deport...
22 December 2011
DOCUMENT - SOUTH AFRICA: CALL FOR SOUTH AFRICA TO FULFIL ITS INTERNATIONAL AND DOMESTIC OBLIGATIONS IN THE PROTECTION OF THE RIGHTS OF REFUGEES AND ASYLUM SEEKERS
AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL
PUBLIC STATEMENT
Index: AFR 53/007/2011
20 December 2011
Amnesty International welcomes the recent rulings in the South African High Court affecting the rights of refugees and asylum-seekers. The North...
15 December 2011
In recent months the judiciary has come under attack for being anti-transformative. Yet the Constitutional Court’s most recent judgments reveal its true transformative credentials. They also reveal the transformative potential of the judiciary generally. The violent dispossession wrought by colonialism and apartheid left millions of people without secure access to land. We continue to...
10 December 2011
REFUGEE lobby groups were in court yesterday challenging what they claimed was a decision by the Department of Home Affairs not to open a new refugee reception office in Johannesburg, after the Crown Mines office was closed by a court order. Yesterday’s case may be the first in a series of challenges on refugee reception offices. Accessibility to these offices is essential for the rights of...
9 December 2011
by Pierre De Vos
It is not surprising that section 26 of the Bill of Rights has become one of the sections most often invoked in cases being argued before the Constitutional Court. In a country in which many people do not have access to formal housing, one in which the property rights of some force many poor and destitute people to act in an unlawful manner, one in which such people often have...
9 December 2011
THE Constitutional Court yesterday ruled in favour of the occupiers of private land near Pretoria who would have been rendered homeless had their evictions been carried out without the City of Tshwane being ordered to provide alternative accommodation.
The cases involved two appeals against eviction judgments by the North Gauteng High Court. In the first judgment, the court ordered...
1 December 2011
IN A strongly worded judgment, the Supreme Court of Appeal has affirmed the principles governing legal protection for asylum seekers in SA and censured a high court acting judge for flouting the "fundamental rules of litigation". While the government has often come in for heavy criticism by the courts for how it handles immigrants and asylum seekers, it is unusual for a judge to...
2 November 2011
HARARE, 25 October 2011 (IRIN) - Doreen Sibanda, 27, was among the first undocumented Zimbabwean nationals to be deported in early October 2011 after South Africa apparently lifted its more than two year moratorium on expulsions imposed following widespread xenophobic violence in 2008.
“I was on my way to the shops to buy porridge for my four-year-old son when I was stopped by the...