Eight years of damning court judgments about its treatment of immigrants have failed to make the home affairs department mend its ways, the acting president of the Supreme Court of Appeal said on Friday.
Dismissing the department's latest attempt to defend its shortcomings, judge Mahomed Navsa described its approach to a case involving hundreds of immigration applications and appeals as "unconscionable".
He added: "It could also rightly be described as disgraceful."
Navsa highlighted the case of Louise Batty, an Australian nurse whose 2015 application for a critical skills visa became a case of "immense hardship".
Batty told the Sunday Times she had "answered God's call" in 2003 and set up an NGO in Limpopo which had since transformed the lives of 9,000 teenage girls by reducing the pregnancy rate from 13% to 0.07% and increasing the matric pass rate to 90%. But the 58-year-old said she was reduced to despair when she appealed against home affairs' peremptory refusal of a critical skills visa.
"It was an absolute shambles and extremely stressful," said Batty, whose Keep the Dream nonprofit organisation is based in Tzaneen. Her visa expired while she waited two and a half years for her appeal to be considered.
The two immigration companies that approached the high court in Cape Town in 2017, winning an order that compelled home affairs to process appeals and applications without "prolonged delays", told the court that the department's dysfunction also placed them and their staff at risk "as they are unable to achieve any results for [their clients]".
De Saude Attorneys and Visa One were hauled to the appeal court by the minister and director-general of home affairs, who adopted what Navsa called a "baffling" approach that was "deliberately obstructive and dilatory".
De Saude and Visa One told the high court judge who heard the original case, Rosheni Allie, that for years home affairs had failed to determine immigration applications in any "reasonable or lawful" period.
"Applications, even simple applications, to the department can take years to be resolved, if they are resolved at all," they said in court papers.
They quoted numerous court judgments between 2011 and 2016 which went against the department and ordered it to improve its performance.
Cape Town immigration attorney Stefanie de Saude said while she was relieved to have been vindicated, "I expect we'll be back in the same boat in a couple of months' time" because home affairs did not have the capacity to comply with the court's instruction to improve its performance.
Batty, who said one official at Tzaneen's home affairs office tore up her forms in front of her, said: "The way home affairs behaved isn't just disgraceful and unconscionable, in the judge's words. It is criminal, and they act without any regard for people trying to do the right thing in this country and go through the right process. It is just nuts."..