Workshop highlights the rights of refugees
Almost 90 per cent of refugee applications are turned down by the Department of Home Affairs.
A FREE community Refugee Law Workshop was hosted at the Musgrave Library, by ProBono.Org last week.
The workshop focused on the asylum seeker and refugee process in South Africa, highlighting the rights and limitations of asylum seekers’ and refugees in respect of employment, education and government grants among other aspects. Speaking at the workshop guest speaker for the day, Carol Holness from Norton Rose Fulbright SA, said almost 90 per cent of refugee applications are turned down by the Department of Home Affairs.
“The rejection rate is so high because Home Affairs uses it as a migration management method to keep people out. They see all refugees as economic migrants. You must remember that a refugee is someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war, or violence and they cannot return to their home country and turning them away because the country wants to keep people out, does not solve the problem and it sometimes leads to them entering the country illegally. Part of the problem is the demand on the system, and Home Affairs didn’t increase its capacity because it wanted to decrease demand,” she said.
United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) issued a report and said in the midst of staggeringly high unemployment figures, South Africa hosted more asylum seekers than any other country in the world at the end of 2015. In the first quarter of 2016, unemployment rose to 26.7 per cent, from 24.5 per cent in the fourth quarter of last year. This translates to more than 5 million people in South Africa who are actively seeking employment. The figure excludes millions of job seekers who have given up looking for work. If this group is added to the unemployment figures the rate would be close to 37 per cent.
The report also showed that the number of asylum-seekers at the end of 2014 in South Africa was estimated to be 1 057 600. Although there hasn’t been a comparable increase in 2015 – the number of new applications in 2015 was relatively low at 62,200 – there was a statistical adjustment in reporting asylum-seeking figures that means that South Africa hosted more asylum-seekers than any other country at the end of 2015.
ProBono.Org is a non-governmental organisation that provides free legal services to the community.
