"I heard it was easy to get asylum here and I was tired of conflict," said Mohammed, another Somali who had arrived at the Marabastad RRO in Pretoria at 2am to join the queue. "I've been here three weeks and this is my fourth time here, I'm just trying my luck. They're asking for the 14 days (section 23) paper, which I don't have."
The section 23 permit is normally issued to anyone entering the country who wants to apply for asylum. It gives them 14 days to report to an RRO and formally apply for refugee status. Following recent amendments to South Africa's immigration law, the section 23 permit will soon only be valid for five days. Several observers at Marabastad said that, increasingly, newly-arrived asylum-seekers had been arriving without section 23 permits and were turned away by home affairs officials before they even reached the entrance to the building. The new and unannounced policy of not issuing section 23 permits appears to have gone into effect just as refugee rights activists were celebrating a high court decision which questioned the legality of the closure of RROs in Johannesburg by the Department of Home Affairs.
Lawyers for Human Rights challenged the Department's decision not to open a new RRO in a city which attracts the largest number of refugees and asylum-seekers in the country. The court found that the decision had in fact been taken in line with a long-term government policy to eventually move all refugee reception services to the country's borders, but that the lack of any public consultation on the matter had been unlawful. In addition, says Africareview.com, a December high court ruling required the department to continue providing services to holders of asylum-seeker and refugee permits pending a full hearing on the matter scheduled for February.
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