Cape Town - The Department of Home Affairs has been urged to hasten the processing of the asylum appeal backlogs which the Department says stands at 131 190 cases.
The department has opted for an email appointment booking system for new asylum applicants, of which 31 973 still need to be processed.
While the department said that the rationale behind the email appointment booking system was to work through the two-year backlog, Adrian Roos, a member of the Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs, said that of the 131 190 applications which remain unfinalised, since 2019 less than 1000 had been finalised.
“The Minister is always quick to blame lack of staff and budget for any one of the various backlogs at Home Affairs, but in this case (it) has been supported with R146, 784,364 million from the UNHCR to implement a 4-year implementation plan to eradicate the backlog.
“The longer the appeal applications take to process, the longer those applicants are legally entitled to work in South Africa. The Minister needs to show some urgency on processing the asylum appeal backlog. Providing assistance to undocumented South Africans in schools is also essential before they disappear from the school system and in to a life of poverty,” said Roos.
Amid a growing narrative of undocumented refugees being the cause of the country’s socio economic problems, Sharon Ekambaram, from the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR), says that the DHA’s inoperable systems and backlogs left asylum seekers and refugees susceptible to unlawful arrest and detention, due to their permits not being issued timeously by the Refugee Reception Offices (RROs).
“The backlog is directly related to the poor quality of decision making when people seeking refugee protection are routinely rejected at RROs. We do not really know the internal operational challenges faced by the DHA; however we are informed by our asylum seeker and refugee clients that when they respond to an invitation to present themselves to the refugee reception offices in person, they are turned away many times due to lost file contents and files that are at an offsite storage facility in Brits, and it takes time to obtain them.
“ We have also found that in some instances they are not following the verification procedures prescribed by the Immigration Regulations, thereby leading people to be detained for prolonged periods of time,” said Ekambaram.
In response, the DHA said that the department had embarked on strategies to recover full services to reduce the possibility of overcrowding.
“The Refugee Reception Centres were opened to all services on 03 May 2022, except for newcomers in Cape Town where the Department is still finalising renovations of the new office. The offices are attending to clients through appointments. Clients who walk-in without appointment, where capacity allows, are also attended to over and above scheduled appointments. So far, the number of appointments received via emails is 17 455, as of 31 May, including duplicates, and there have been 1860 appointments booked as of 31 May.
“Given the backlog estimates built over the past two years, the department is embarking on strategies to recover full services in a manner that reduces the possibility of overcrowding through the continuation of the online solutions to manage the volumes of clients visiting offices versus capacity, increase capacity at offices with limited capacity, prioritise the reopening of Cape Town Refugee Reception Office to newcomers, and utilise overtime in particular on critical areas like new comer adjudication.
“Furthermore, the Department is also finalising the recovery strategy which includes fast-tracking recruitment of additional staff, working overtime and the re-opening of the Cape Town Refugee Centre; these processes, once concluded, will assist in eradicating the backlog that was created by the closure,” said DHA.