Home Affairs challenging order to reopen PE refugee centre

The Department of Home Affairs has presented a number of reasons why it believed the Supreme Court of Appeal’s (SCA’s) order that it must reopen the Port Elizabeth refugee reception office by July 1 was incorrect.

The department has applied to the Constitutional Court to set aside the SCA’s order made on March 25.

Refugee reception offices provide services to those who want to apply for asylum in South Africa.

At the beginning of 2011 there were six such offices in the country, in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town, Durban, Musina and Port Elizabeth.

Since then, the department has closed the Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth and Cape Town offices. The closure of these offices has been challenged in various courts.

The Somali Association of South Africa obtained a court order from the Grahamstown High Court in 2013 declaring that the decision in 2012 by the home affairs director-general Mkuseli Apleni to close the Port Elizabeth office was unlawful.

The court also directed the director-general to ensure that a refugee reception office in Port Elizabeth was open and fully functional by October 1 2013.

The department appealed to the Supreme Court of Appeal against the judgment of Judge Willem Eksteen.

Apleni told the SCA that the most operationally strategic and convenient places to locate refugee reception offices were points of entry utilised by those entering the country. He said Port Elizabeth was not such a point of entry.

He said records indicated that those applying for asylum in Port Elizabeth hailed from China, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Somalia and Ethiopia and none of them used the city as a port of entry.

In its judgment in March, Judge of Appeal Visvanathan Ponnan said this case concerned the lawfulness of a decision by Apleni to ‘dis-establish’ an office which had been located in Port Elizabeth since 2000.

In her founding affidavit before the Constitutional Court, the department’s attorney Leonie Hart said the purpose of the powers in the Refugees Act was to ensure that there were as many refugee reception offices in South Africa as the director-general regarded as necessary for the purposes of the Act.

“The Act does not require the director-general to locate these [refugee reception offices] in any specific place,” Hart said.

She said the Port Elizabeth office serviced a comparatively small number of asylum seekers. She said in 2010, only 3% of new applications were processed at that office.

Lawyers for Human Rights, which represents the association, said it was in the process of preparing its papers to oppose the department's application.