Home Affairs has pulled its asylum directive. The court ruling behind it still stands.

South Africa has withdrawn a Home Affairs directive governing how asylum applications are processed, after days of unrest in Durban and Soweto in which 24 vehicles were torched and shops were looted.

As Deutsche Welle reported on 8 October, the department pulled the directive after the protests. The withdrawal is the administrative step. The court judgment that made the directive necessary in the first place has not been set aside, and that is the part a reader standing in a Home Affairs queue needs to understand.

What the court actually decided

The judgment held that asylum seekers cannot be refused entry to South Africa’s asylum system on procedural grounds alone, including having entered the country without documentation. That is the mechanism at the centre of this story. A person who arrives at a refugee reception office without the right paperwork is still entitled to have their claim processed, because the court found that certain provisions of the government’s refugee policy were unconstitutional.

The department has stressed that the judgment does not grant refugee status or permanent residence automatically to anyone who enters South Africa. That is correct, and it is worth being precise about it. Access to the system is not the same as a decision in your favour. A person who is allowed to lodge a claim still has to prove it, and the outcome can be a refusal.

What the ruling removed was the procedural gate. It did not open a legal door to status.

Why the offices buckled

The department said its asylum offices were quickly overwhelmed and that officers were placed at serious risk. That is the operational problem the directive was meant to manage, and it is a real one. Refugee reception offices have a fixed capacity, a fixed number of adjudicators and a fixed number of hours in a day. When the volume of people arriving rises sharply, the queue does not shorten. It moves onto the pavement outside.

The withdrawal of the directive does not create new capacity. It removes a set of processing rules. What fills the gap between the ruling and the office counter has not been set out publicly.

What happened on the ground

The unrest in Durban followed a protest by a group demanding that a refugee centre stop processing asylum applications. Vehicles were overturned and set alight. Foreign-owned shops were looted. The unrest then spread to Soweto on the Thursday, where 14 cars were torched in Durban and 10 in Soweto, shops were looted in both places, and residents clashed with foreign shop owners. Gunshots were heard, according to the broadcaster Newzroom Afrika.

Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Superintendent Xolani Fihla told SABC television that clashes had taken place between foreign nationals and South African nationals in the area, and that no injuries had been reported at that point.

No group or individual may enforce immigration law in this country. That authority belongs to the state. Torching a vehicle, looting a shop and blocking a patient from treatment are crimes, whether or not the people doing them believe they are acting on a grievance about immigration. A self-declared deadline has no standing in law.

The wider year

South Africa has seen months of anti-illegal-immigration protest this year. Populist and anti-illegal-immigration groups demanded that undocumented foreign nationals leave by 30 June. Amid international criticism, tens of thousands of people have left the country, and some were repatriated by their own governments.

The backdrop is an economy that remains the largest in Africa and continues to attract migrants, with roughly a third of the population unemployed. Migrants are often blamed for taking jobs, fuelling crime and straining public services. Social scientists have said those accusations are not supported by the evidence.

What a reader is entitled to

If you are an asylum seeker, the position after the withdrawal is this. The court’s finding on procedural access stands. The department’s directive on how claims are processed has been pulled. The judgment does not give you status. It gives you a route to be heard, and the department has said publicly that it does not read the ruling as granting more than that.

If you are a South African living near a reception office or a shop that was looted, the position is that the processing rules have changed twice in a matter of weeks, and the department has not said what replaces the withdrawn directive.

Source: Deutsche Welle, South Africa pulls asylum directive after violent protests