Home Affairs withdraws asylum directive after 24 cars torched in Durban and Soweto

The Department of Home Affairs has withdrawn a directive setting out how asylum applications are processed, after protests in Durban and Soweto left 24 vehicles burnt and shops looted in both places.

Fourteen cars were torched in Durban. Ten were torched in Soweto, where the unrest spread on Thursday.

According to Johannesburg Metropolitan Police Department spokesman Superintendent Xolani Fihla, speaking to SABC television, there were clashes in the area between foreign nationals and South African nationals. He said no injuries had been reported at that point.

As Deutsche Welle reported on 8 October, the directive was issued by the department in response to a court judgment. That judgment held that asylum seekers cannot be denied access to South Africa’s asylum system on procedural grounds alone, such as having entered the country illegally.

The department has said its offices for asylum seekers were quickly overwhelmed after the ruling, and that this placed officers at serious risk.

The unrest in Durban followed a protest by a group demanding that a refugee centre stop processing asylum applications. Vehicles were overturned and set on fire, and foreign-owned shops were looted. In Soweto, gunshots were heard, according to the broadcaster Newzroom Afrika.

On Wednesday the government emphasised that the judgment does not grant refugee status or permanent residence automatically to anyone who enters South Africa.

That clarification matters to the queue outside every refugee reception office in the country. A court judgment that removes a procedural barrier is not the same thing as a decision on a person’s claim. Each application is still decided on its own facts, and the judgment does not change who qualifies for protection under the Refugees Act.

What the judgment changed was the door. People who would previously have been turned away at the counter on the basis of how they arrived can now be processed. The department’s own account is that the volume that followed was more than its offices could absorb.

What is not in dispute is that no group, movement or individual may enforce immigration law in this country. That authority belongs to the state. A self-declared deadline has no standing in law. A blockade that stops a refugee centre processing applications, or that denies a patient treatment, is a crime and not a protest tactic. Arson, public violence, intimidation and unlawful deprivation of liberty are all offences under South African law, and the people who committed them are the people who answer for them.

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

Social scientists have said the accusations that migrants take jobs, drive crime and strain public services are not supported by evidence. That finding sits alongside a real and documented strain. South Africa’s unemployment rate stands at about a third of the population, and the country remains the largest economy on the continent, which continues to draw people from across the region and beyond.

The two facts belong beside each other. What the evidence does not support is the claim that the first is caused by the second.

The withdrawal of the directive does not close the asylum system. It returns the department to the position it held before the directive was issued, which is the position the court set. What happens at the counters now depends on whether the department can process the volume the judgment allows, and on whether the policing that followed the unrest holds.

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