Programme News
27 September 2011
(News)
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...
25 September 2011
(Press release)
Schubart Park Residents Spend Weekend on Streets Despite City’s Promises
The evicted residents of Schubart Park spent the weekend on the streets of Pretoria after the City of Tshwane failed to fulfill its promises to provide alternative accommodation to them.
Residents were allowed into the buildings for a brief period to collect their belongings, but then spent the rest of...
23 September 2011
(News)
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...
2 September 2011
(News)
Mail and Guardian: Foreigners in Middelburg, Mpumalanga, allege that the local council is working hand in glove with local business people to shut down their shops. The Somali Refugee Forum claims that since mid-June about 50 Somali, Ethiopian and other foreign-owned tuckshops have been closed in the Steve Tshwete municipality, which includes Middelburg and surrounding townships, and that local...
31 August 2011
(News)
IRIN: In a week that saw two Somali traders shot dead in Cape Town and two more in Port Elizabeth, the South African government's handling of xenophobia received the lowest possible rating in a report by the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) Monitoring Project. Three years after widespread violence against foreigners broke out across the country, evaluators from the Monitoring Project noted...
17 August 2011
(News)
Sowetan : An Act protecting children's rights might be changed to give parents and caregivers more voice before children are removed from their care. The Constitutional Court heard yesterday that the Act infringed on the right of the child to family care or parental care. Ann Skelton, of the Centre for Child Law at the University of Pretoria, said parents and caregivers had to be interviewed...
10 August 2011
(News)
05 August 2011 | ILSE DE LANGE
JOHANNESBURG - A North Gauteng High Court judge yesterday ordered the Steve Biko Hospital in Pretoria to immediately recommence treatment of a four-year-old Zimbabwean girl, who is critically ill with a malignant brain tumour. The little girl’s father went to court with the help of Lawyers for Human Rights after the hospital told him his daughter’s...
10 August 2011
(News)
Aug 8, 2011 | KHETHIWE CHELEMU
In what could be a landmark case, 19 Ethiopian men have taken Minister of Home Affairs Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma to court, claiming her department illegally arrested them.
In court papers filed in the Johannesburg High Court, the men claim that the Department of Foreign Affairs acted unlawfully by arresting them hours after they arrived in the city on June 26 and by...
3 August 2011
(News)
If you spend an afternoon near the Beit Bridge border, 18km from Musina, you may encounter a group of boys playing soccer in the street. Typical teenagers, they laugh and joke, exhausting every last ray of sunlight before the day’s end.
Night is harsher; some sleep in a container down the road sponsored by Save the Children. Others sleep on the streets, lying on top of one another for...
15 July 2011
(Press release)
Johannesburg, 14 July 2011. Immigration detention in South Africa and internationally is extremely expensive, can harm the health and wellbeing of those detained and has been found to not be effective at deterring irregular migrants, including Zimbabweans. Global research spanning two years conducted by La Trobe University and the International Detention Coalition (IDC) found cheaper...