South Africa Case Study

Policing and managing borders in South Africa.

In South Africa, human mobility is of great concern, especially with regards to fundamental questions of the rights and security of migrants. In early 2011, a United Nations delegation called on South Africa to “improve social cohesion and measures against discrimination, exploitation, a tendency by the police and immigration officials to ignore the rights of migrants, and the overall lack of a comprehensive immigration policy that incorporates human rights protection and security. Statements by the then Minister of Home Affairs, and now the African Union Secretary General, Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma raises ambivalence about the protection of migrants and asylum seekers in South Africa. This emanates from the falsehood that migrants are a threat to the country’s economic and political transformation . Consortium for Refugee and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA, 2010) argues that efforts to establish a system of policies and laws that protect migrants and refugees cannot be divorced from the objective of building a just and transformed South Africa.

In March 2008, the South African Refugees Act and the Immigration Act were both brought forward for critical amendments. The South African Deputy Home Affairs Minister Fatima Chohan stated that the proposed amendments would make it more difficult for those trying to abuse the asylum process in South Africa . In effect, the proposed amendment was a direct denial of the already limited rights of those fleeing persecution to seek safety and protection within the borders of South Africa. While these acts were still in the amendment phase, the Department of Home Affairs already started its implementation, especially with the exercise of pre-screen...

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...kers grossly violates Article 33 of the 1951 UN Refugees Convention on “non-refoulement” principle, which is part of international customary law. The European Court of Human Rights also found this same practice illegal and further ruled that returning an Eritrean to his country origin where asylum system was deficient constituted ‘indirect refoulement . According to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Article 13-2), “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country .” The thorny most critical question in the case of South Africa is; if the right to emigrate is accepted, what about the parallel to immigrate? This question raises critical issues about the relevance of contemporary migration policies that have increasingly been restrictive, making international mobility particularly problematic. It has been noted that,