Home Affairs may go to court

Cape Town - The Home Affairs Department has been threatened with legal action over an apparent refusal to renew asylum seeker permits.

But the department has denied there is a ban on renewals, a move which would leave large numbers of foreigners vulnerable to arrest and deportation.

It says it is in fact trying to deal with asylum applications more efficiently.

The Legal Resources Centre's Cape Town office on Wednesday sent a letter to Home Affairs Minister Nosiviwe Mapisa-Nqakula and her director-general, threatening high court action if what it called "this pernicious instruction" was not revoked.

LRC attorney William Kerfoot said in the letter he had been told that department staff had been instructed not to renew any so-called section 22 permits, and to require that people applying for renewals should be interviewed and their status determined immediately.

"Needless to say this is not happening, with the obvious result that vast numbers of asylum seekers will be wandering around without valid section 22 permits and will repeatedly have to wait fruitlessly for interviews," he said in the letter.

"The instruction that section 22 permits are not to be renewed is clearly unlawful and [un]workable."

Kerfoot told Sapa the permits were vital for asylum seekers to get jobs and to access banking services, schools and health facilities.

"This is just outrageous," he said. "If you thought in the past that they [home affairs] were insensitive, callous and incompetent, you haven't seen anything yet."

He said the instruction not to renew the permits, normally issued for three to six months, had been confirmed to him by a home affairs official dealing with refugees.

He said the LRC was acting for, among other people, a man who was refused a renewal at the home affairs refugee office in Nyanga, Cape Town, this week.

"And I'm sitting with a man now, a Congolese, who had the same thing happen to him," he said.

Department spokesperson Siobhan McCarthy told Sapa that in the past, when asylum seekers walked into a reception centre for the first time, officials would capture their personal details, and photograph and fingerprint them.

The officials would issue them with a permit, and tell them to come back at a later date for an interview with a status determination officer.

McCarthy said the problem was that due to increasing numbers of asylum seekers, the delay between application and interview had grown unacceptably long.

The department had decided instead that as far as possible both new applicants and those seeking renewals should be interviewed on that day, and was increasing its interviewing capacity to this end.

"As far as possible we are not renewing permits, and moving on to the next step which is the interview and decision," she said.

She said some permits would however have to be renewed, as there was a limit on the number of interviews that could be done each day.

- SAPA