- The Helen Suzman Foundation and the Zimbabwe Immigration Federation will proceed to challenge in court docket the choice to scrap Zimbabwean Exemption Permits (ZEPs).
- The challenge will go ahead although authorities has prolonged the ZEP by six months to June 2023.
- 178 000 permit holders face deportation if they can not discover some various authorized permission to dwell in South Africa.
- The basis has slammed an opposing affidavit by the Home Affairs director-general as a “ploy to downplay the impact of the minister’s decision”.
The Helen Suzman Foundation (HSF) and the Zimbabwe Immigration Federation are proceeding with court action against Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi over the scrapping of Zimbabwean Exemption Permits (ZEPs).
The court docket challenge will proceed although the minister just lately introduced an prolonged “grace period” of one other six months for some 178 000 permit holders to “regularise their status” or depart the nation, till June 2023. The preliminary deadline to apply for waivers or various visas was the tip of December this 12 months.
The minister first introduced in December 2021 that the ZEP, launched 13 years in the past to regularise the scenario of Zimbabweans already dwelling, working and learning in South Africa, was to be scrapped.
In media interviews, the minister mentioned the six-month extension was crucial as a result of so few permit holders had made functions for waivers and different visas and it was on the recommendation of a particular ministerial committee he appointed to oversee the method.
The HSF, in its application filed within the Pretoria High Court, says the blanket choice not to renew ZEPs was “hasty, untransparent and ill-considered”.
The federation needs the court docket to rule that the choice was illegal, unconstitutional and invalid, and that it have to be reviewed and remitted again to the minister for reconsideration “using a fair process” involving significant engagement with these affected and civil society.
The federation is in search of an interdict, restraining the federal government respondents, together with the minister, the Department of Home Affairs, the police and border management, from detaining or deporting any holder of a ZEP, pending an extra software, nonetheless to be filed, to overview and put aside the minister’s choice.
In opposing the HSF software, Director-General of the Department of Home Affairs Livhuwani Tommy Makhode mentioned the grace interval had been granted exactly for the aim of permitting permit holders to make representations.
It was a “meaningful opportunity” to regularise their standing.
He mentioned the ZEPs had been all the time supposed to be non permanent and if the court docket granted the reduction, it will “effectively confer rights of permanent residence on ZEP holders, in the face of express conditions on which the permits were issued”.
DG ‘contradicts’ minister in court docket papers
In a responding affidavit, HSF Executive Director Nicole Fritz, mentioned the inspiration didn’t contend that the minister was obliged to prolong ZEPs in perpetuity.
She mentioned the inspiration argued {that a} choice to terminate the programme might solely be lawful if it adopted a good and rational course of, based mostly on sound justification, and giving present ZEP holders a correct alternative to get their affairs so as.
Fritz mentioned Makhode “seeks to create the impression that the minister may grant further extensions in terms of waiver applications, based on individual circumstances on a case by case basis”.
“The director-general’s attempt to re-interpret the minister’s decision is a contrivance and unsustainable … it is inconsistent with the decision communicated to ZEP holders and the public at large … it is directly contradicted by the minister’s own public statements,” she mentioned.
These had been to the impact that he had made a closing choice to terminate ZEPs and the one choice open to holders was to apply for different visas out there underneath the Immigration Act.
“The director-general’s contradictory position on individual exceptions demonstrates that there is no genuine intention to afford this remedy to ZEP holders. This is merely a ploy to downplay the impact of the minister’s decision,” Fritz mentioned.
She mentioned there was no dispute that the minister had failed to seek the advice of with the permit holders, civil society and the general public earlier than taking the choice, that the majority permit holders wouldn’t have the option to get different visas, and that Zimbabwe remained politically unstable and was nonetheless experiencing excessive poverty.
She mentioned waiver functions required that these making use of had to present “good cause” why the precise provisions within the Immigration Act shouldn’t apply to them. This required the involvement of attorneys, which most permit holders couldn’t afford.
Fritz connected an affidavit from an employer of a permit holder who described how she finally gave up, in frustration on the complexity, prices and delays within the course of.
The minister had additionally made the “astonishing” “admission” that in additional than 9 months, not a single choice in respect of the 4,000 alleged waiver functions, had been made, Fritz mentioned.
“The ZEP holders had been, on the director-general’s personal admission, pressured by the dire circumstances of their nation to come to South Africa. They have been within the nation for over a decade, have invested in companies and careers, constructed households, have youngsters and have solid lives right here … it can’t be significantly denied that the minister’s choice limits their proper to dignity.
“This is compounded by his refusal to engage with them before making his decision, sending a message that their voices and experiences count for nothing.”
Fritz additionally weighed in on the general public “attack” by Motsoaledi on the HSF for going to court docket, through which he said that the inspiration was engaged in a “desperate bid to blackmail the nation”, and that South Africa “was now under the dictatorship of some of the NGOs with some having faceless and dubious funders”.
“That the HSF should earn such scorn … for acting in the public interest and attempting to secure relief for a particular vulnerable grouping in South Africa, is an affront to the best traditions of our constitutional order,” she mentioned.
The functions are to be heard collectively and the listening to has been set down for 3 days, from 5 to 7 October.
The consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa has joined the proceedings as an intervening get together.
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