Between countries‚ Ghislain is stuck in limbo

22 March 2016 - 13:00 By Farren Collins
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When Ghislain’s father died in the Republic of Congo last year‚ the threat of prison or death meant the 35-year-old could not go home to bury him. Instead‚ he wept alone in Cape Town.

After civil war broke out‚ Ghislain fled to the neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. When he returned home a year later he was accused of being a rebel‚ and arrested.

After being released and detained three times‚ he escaped from prison with help from a sympathetic rebel commander‚ and fled to South Africa in 2011.

Since then he has been in limbo‚ waiting for his appeal for refugee status to be heard. His initial asylum application was rejected.

Ghislain has to spend up to two days every three months renewing his temporary permit‚ and his chances of a successful appeal are slim because South Africa rejects more refugee applications than any other country‚ according to an analysis of UN High Commissioner for Refugees data conducted by Code4SA’s Data Journalism Academy.

In 2014 and the first half of 2015‚ the Department of Home Affairs turned down 81% of refugee applications‚ compared with the international average of 21%.

In that period‚ more than 150 000 people from 24 countries sought asylum in South Africa‚ making it the third-most popular destination for refugees.

This was at the time Europe received one of its largest influxes of refugees — people fleeing war in Syria‚ the aftermath of the Libyan war‚ and the expansion of Islamic State across the Middle East.

The UNHCR data also reveals that‚ with nearly 800 000 cases‚ South Africa had more than a third of the world’s pending refugee applications. Most come from African and Asian countries‚ including Bangladesh and India.

A huge backlog in processing applications has created a humanitarian crisis that has left thousands of people struggling in situations much like Ghislain’s.

Roni Amit‚ of the African Centre for Migration and Society at Wits University — whose research in 2012 showed that only about half of all refugee applicants were economic migrants — suggested that the government was intentionally conflating immigrants with refugees to keep people out.

“The rejection rate is so high because they use it as a migration management method to keep people out of the country — it is in their interest. They see all refugees as economic migrants‚” he said.

“Part of the problem is the demand on the system‚ and Home Affairs didn’t increase its capacity because it wanted to decrease demand.”

Home Affairs spokesman Mayihlome Tshwete said there was no such objective. Instead‚ the department believed that fraudulent claims by economic migrants were the cause of the backlog. These people made “deliberate attempts to abuse the system” by applying for refugee status when it wasn’t warranted.

Since 2012 the government has closed refugee application centres in Port Elizabeth‚ Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Home Affairs rejected 96% of refugee applications in 2015‚ according to a report presented to Parliament on March 8. It said that by the end of the first quarter of 2015‚ 2406 people had been granted asylum. For the rest of the year‚ only 93 applications received a positive ruling.

The increase in rejections coincided with the introduction of a mechanism to monitor the decisions of officers who determine refugee status. "Their decisions were reviewed by the Standing Committee on Refugee Affairs, but the process has since been discontinued."

At the heart of the problem was the failure to have properly qualified and trained refugee status determination officers‚ according to attorney William Kerfoot‚ of the Legal Resources Centre in Cape Town. The centre assists up to 6 000 asylum seekers’ appeal cases annually.

“The latest fashion is undereducated‚ incompetent refugee status determination officers [who] view each application as fraudulent and therefore as manifestly unfounded‚” Kerfoot said. “If they don’t say it’s fraudulent they say it’s unfounded.

“In many instances they have the power of life and death in their hands and they get it wrong most of the time. They commit procedural and substantive errors on a daily basis.”

Tshwete admitted a capacity problem but said there were deliberate attempts to abuse weaknesses in the process.

“People are seeing that the easiest way into South Africa is as an asylum seeker‚” he said. “We have a majority of people who know they can apply and also know they can appeal and still stay for up to five years.

“Even with manifestly unfounded judgments people still know they can appeal.

“Many people‚ like those from Zimbabwe‚ come from countries that aren’t in civil war. We get the impression that most asylum seekers from these countries are economic migrants.

“Our system is liberal‚ and by its nature casts a wide net and makes it harder to distinguish between genuine and not. We need to remove economic migrants from the asylum process so that we can assess them properly.”

For now‚ Ghislain remains in the ranks of thousands of asylum seekers who spend years in a state of uncertainty‚ prevented from starting over but unable to go back. — This story was produced by the Code4SA Data Journalism Academy

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