NEWS RELEASE FROM LAWYERS FOR HUMAN RIGHTS – 26 JUNE 2008
The Pretoria High Court today ordered the Department of Home Affairs to release a group of Zimbabwean asylum seekers who are unlawfully detained at the Lindela immigration detention centre. Lawyers for Human Rights brought this application on behalf of the Zimbabwe Exiles Forum and 33 political asylum seekers who were arrested during the course of a demonstration on 25 April 2008 outside the Chinese Embassy in Pretoria to protest against the deployment of a Chinese Ship, the An Yue Jiang, carrying arms to Zimbabwe.
After their arrest, the group was transported to Lindela and forced to sign deportation notices. Notwithstanding their applications for asylum and their expressed intentions to apply for asylum, the group was detained at Lindela in terms of a 30-day administrative detention warrant, issued for the purposes of deportation. When Home Affairs refused to release the group notwithstanding their applications of asylum and the written demands of LHR, an urgent high court application was launched to secure their interim release, together with an order directing Home Affairs to issue asylum seeker permits pending an application to declare various aspects of the Home Affairs’ policy unlawful and unconstitutional.
Astonishingly, when the detention warrant expired on 15 May the Department of Home Affairs continued to detain the group unlawfully. Only a month later Home Affairs decided to release half of the group. However, none of them was provided with an asylum seeker permit which confirms their status as asylum seekers and protects them against re-arrest and deportation. The remaining fourteen asylum seekers, whose applications for asylum had, in the interim, been rejected as unfounded by Home Affairs were ‘released’ and then promptly re-arrested by immigration officials at Lindela.
LHR argued in court that Home Affairs’ tactic of ‘releasing’ and then re-arresting the fourteen applicants is a cynical attempt to circumvent the system of judicial oversight of detention prescribed in the Constitution, the Immigration Act and Refugees Act. According to Adv Jacob van Garderen, National Director of LHR, “this policy smacks of apartheid-style tactics to keep detainees in indefinite detention.”
Although the court ordered the release of the asylum seekers LHR will proceed with the main application to declare Home Affairs’ policy of detaining bona fide asylum seekers unlawful. In the meantime LHR urgently requests the government to declare a moratorium on the deportation of Zimbabweans pending the normalization of the political and economic crisis in that country.
For more information please contact: Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh at Kaajal [at] lhr [dot] org [dot] za (Kaajal [at] lhr [dot] org [dot] za) / 084 514 8039 or Jacob van Garderen at Jacob [at] lhr [dot] org [dot] za (Jacob [at] lhr [dot] org [dot] za) / 082 820 3960
