Vehicle torched at Constitutional Hill as Home Affairs withdraws asylum directive
The department pulled a 28 September instruction on asylum intake the same day protests returned to Johannesburg, after a July ConCourt ruling struck down parts of the Refugees Act.
A vehicle was torched at the Constitutional Hill Human Rights Precinct in Johannesburg on Friday as fresh protests moved through the city centre, with demonstrators expected to converge on the Constitutional Court.
Motorists and members of the public were urged to avoid the area and to exercise caution, according to authorities cited by eNCA, which reported the torching and the spread of the protests on Friday.
The same day, the Department of Home Affairs withdrew a directive issued on 28 September governing the intake of asylum applications.
That withdrawal is the administrative centre of a dispute that has been building since 7 July, when the Constitutional Court declared certain provisions of the Refugees Act unconstitutional and invalid. The court found that asylum seekers could not be kept out of the asylum system purely because of procedural failures in their applications.
What followed the judgment was unrest in Durban and Soweto in which more than 20 vehicles were torched, according to the account published by eNCA.
The sequence matters for anyone trying to follow the story from the outside. The July judgment set a legal standard. The September directive was Home Affairs’ attempt to manage the intake of applications under that standard. Friday’s withdrawal removes that attempt, and Friday’s protest in Johannesburg is the latest public expression of a dispute that now involves the courts, the department and the streets at the same time.
For an ordinary reader, the practical questions are narrower than the politics. An asylum seeker whose paperwork was rejected on procedural grounds has a court-backed route back into the system. A Home Affairs official processing intake has lost the directive that told them how to handle that. And anyone travelling through the Johannesburg CBD on a protest day faces road closures, diversions and the risk that comes with a crowd and a burning vehicle in the same precinct.
The Constitutional Court sits at Constitutional Hill, which is why the precinct is the destination for marches of this kind. It is also a heritage site and a working court, so a protest there disrupts hearings as well as traffic.
No arrests, no injury figures and no further detail on the torched vehicle were contained in the material available at the time of writing. The Enquirer has not independently verified the number of vehicles destroyed in the earlier Durban and Soweto unrest beyond the figure reported by eNCA.
Source: eNCA, Vehicle torched at Constitutional Hill as protests erupt in Joburg CBD.
