SA’s new refugee regulations could have been drafted by Trump, says activist
By Tania Broughton
South Africa’s new rules governing asylum seekers and refugees could easily have been drafted by the Trump administration, says Sharon Ekambaram of Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR).
The regulations, which forbid refugees and asylum seekers from engaging in any political activity, even if it concerns issues in their home countries, came into effect as part of the Refugee Amendment Act on 1 January. They were gazetted on 27 December, taking civil society organisations by surprise. The content of the regulations took no account of some 2,000 submissions made in 2016 slamming the “restrictive and punitive” proposals.
Apart from the ban on political activity, the regulations also ban refugees and asylum seekers from visiting their home countries or visiting their local embassies.
They will be compelled to get a “refugee” visa at the point of entry to South Africa - which is largely up to the whim of the immigration officials on duty. They will also be banned from certain jobs in certain industries.
An immigration official will be able to demand a paternity test from an asylum seeker who wishes to enter South Africa with his children. Failure will result in the child or children being handed over to social workers.
Ekambaram, who is manager of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at LHR, told GroundUp: “We want to meet with the Minister. We will mobilise civil society.”
She says these “regressive” policies will further exacerbate chronic processing delays and show that South Africa is “dismantling its international obligation to provide protection to asylum seekers and refugees”.
“In our submissions to Parliament on the proposed amendments in 2016, LHR pointed out a number of concerns regarding the amendment to the principal Act which has now been passed into law. We pointed out that the changes proposed at the time represented drastic changes to refugee protection and adjudication in South Africa and we stated that this presented a massive deviation from the urban refugee policy — which has been the cornerstone of refugee protection in South Africa since the inception of refugee protection.”
She says the previous legislation based on that policy, passed soon after the end of apartheid, was “transformative given the racist apartheid laws governing the movement of black people in our country and more specifically the Aliens Controls Act.”
This article originally appeared in full on GroundUp