Asylum in South Africa: what the process actually requires, and who decides

Shops in Durban’s central business district were closed on Saturday as police stayed on high alert, after vehicles were torched, buildings set alight and businesses looted during protests against undocumented immigration. KwaZulu-Natal Premier Thami Ntuli has asked for the South African National Defence Force to be deployed to help restore order. As SABC News reported on 10 October, the unrest followed tensions around asylum applications after a Constitutional Court ruling opened access to the asylum process.

That last sentence is where most readers will stop, because it joins two things that are not the same thing. A court ruling about access to a process cannot legalise anyone’s presence in the country. Whether a person may stay is decided under the Immigration Act, by an immigration officer, and the asylum process is a separate statutory route with its own decision-maker. What the ruling changed was access to that route, not the outcome of it.

What the asylum process actually is

South Africa’s asylum system runs on the Refugees Act. A person who arrives at a port of entry and intends to apply for asylum is entitled to be issued with an asylum transit permit, which allows them to travel to a Refugee Reception Office and apply within a set period. That permit is not refugee status. It is a document that lets a person reach the office where the application is made.

At the reception office, the applicant is interviewed and the application is registered. If the application is accepted for processing, the person is issued an asylum seeker permit, which must be renewed while the claim is considered. If the claim is refused, the applicant has a right of review or appeal, and ultimately access to the courts. If the claim is granted, the person is recognised as a refugee and may apply for a refugee identity document and a travel document.

The decision-maker is the Standing Committee for Refugee Affairs and, at first instance, the Refugee Status Determination Officer in the Department of Home Affairs. Not the police. Not a march. Not a crowd at a shopfront. That is the part of the architecture that the week’s argument has obscured, and it is the part a reader most needs to know.

What the ruling did, and what it did not do

The Constitutional Court ruling at the centre of this week’s reporting concerned access to the asylum process. Access is the operative word. It means a person who is entitled to apply is not shut out of the system before the system has considered them. It does not mean that every applicant is granted status, and it does not mean that a person who has never applied is now lawfully in the country.

Home Affairs has made that same point in public statements since the ruling, and it is correct on the law. Where the department’s communication has been weaker is the other half of the sentence: a person who is entitled to apply and cannot reach a reception office because the office is closed, the queue does not move or the online system does not work has been denied the access the court affirmed. That is an administrative failure, and it is measurable. It is also the failure that produces the frustration the protests are drawing on.

What a person at the counter is entitled to

A reader standing in a Home Affairs queue with an asylum matter has four things they can ask for, and they are not favours.

They can ask for a written record of the decision on their application, including the reasons, because a refusal that cannot be reviewed is not a decision in law.

They can ask for the renewal of an asylum seeker permit while a claim is pending, because the permit is the document that makes their presence lawful while the claim is decided.

They can ask to be told which office or committee is handling the matter, and on what date it was received, because a file that cannot be located cannot be decided.

And they can ask for the contact details of the Refugee Appeals Authority if the claim has been refused, because the appeal route is a right and not a discretionary courtesy.

Where those things are not provided, the correct remedy is a complaint to the department, a referral to the Public Protector, or an application to the courts. It is not a march on a shop, and it is not a blockade of a clinic. No group, movement or individual may enforce immigration law in this country, because that authority belongs to the state and to no one else. A self-declared deadline has no standing in law. Torching a vehicle is arson. Setting a building alight is arson. Looting a shop is theft. Intimidating a person out of a queue or a home is a crime, and it is prosecuted as one.

Who is actually answerable

The accountability in this story sits with named institutions. The Department of Home Affairs runs the asylum system, and its capacity to process claims is the bottleneck the court ruling exposed. The South African Police Service is responsible for public order in the Durban CBD, and it has been on high alert since reports of planned marches. The National Prosecuting Authority decides whether the people arrested during the unrest are charged and brought to court. The Premier has asked for the SANDF, and that request now sits with the national government, which decides whether and how soldiers are deployed in support of the police.

Ordinary residents of the CBD are the ones who carried the cost of the closures, the burned vehicles and the shut shops. They are also, in the main, the people who kept their heads and did not join the destruction, and that deserves to be said as plainly as the damage does.

What happens next

The immediate question is whether the deployment the Premier requested is approved, and whether the police presence already in place holds the line through the next round of reported marches. The slower question is the one that will still be here when the streets are quiet: whether Home Affairs can process asylum claims fast enough, and issue permits reliably enough, that the access the court affirmed is real rather than theoretical.

That is the measure to watch. Not a slogan about who belongs here, but the number of applications registered, the number of permits renewed, and the time each one takes.

Source: SABC News, Shops remain closed amid public safety fears in Durban’s CBD, 10 October 2026.