Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi after briefing Parliament.

Every child needs to go to school, Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi has said.

He said when he asked the Department of Basic Education why immigrant children were barred from school, he was told the department was scared of home affairs inspectors.

"That can't happen in any modern democracy. I told them home affairs inspectors must not visit any schools unless there is a crime committed that needs home affairs. It's more dangerous to have a child who is not in school."

"Send them to school … We'll look at the documentation later."

He was speaking to GroundUp after briefing a joint meeting of the portfolio committees on Home Affairs and Cooperative Governance and Traditional Affairs on Tuesday.Motsoaledi told GroundUp that the three special permits which were issued to legalise the status of nationals from Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Angolans already living in South Africa, would be renewed.

"The Lesotho permit is expiring in December. I am already in the process of renewing it," said Motsoaledi. "We can't stop those special permits if the problems that led to those special permits are not yet resolved. "Unfortunately the Zimbabwean permit was for four years and the situation never became normal in those four years. We will renew, but we can't automatically as the department. We have got to discuss with the Cabinet."

"The issue of migration is not purely a problem of home affairs as the mayor of Johannesburg would like people to believe," said Motsoaledi. "It talks to many government departments because it talks to economy; it talks to job creation; it talks to inequality; it talks to unemployment – all those issues cannot be resolved by one department which is called home affairs.

"We have accepted long ago that our borders are porous. We have presented to Parliament before that we are going to spruce up the Border Management Authority. We want to bring that forward," he said.

In 2009, the South African government introduced a Dispensation of Zimbabwean Permit(DZP) to legalise the many Zimbabweans already inside the countrybecause of the political and socio-economic situation there.

In 2014, the DZP was renewed and renamed ZSP (Zimbabwean Special Permit), which expired in December 2017. The ZSP was replaced with the ZEP (Zimbabwe Exemption Permit), which will expire in 2021.

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The Equal Education Law Centre says it has secured placement of more than 100 children in Matatiele for the 2020 academic year. The children were out of school due to lack of identity documentation.

All undocumented children, including children of illegal foreigners, are entitled to receive basic education, the high court in Makhanda in the Eastern Cape ruled on Thursday.

The basic education department will in future be obliged to provide and fund a basic education for all undocumented children, including children of illegal foreigners.

It is estimated that the judgment will affect over a million undocumented children who are either seeking admission to public schools or who have been warned to provide documentation to avoid being excluded.

Eastern Cape judge president Selby Mbenenge set aside sections of the schools’ admission policy which in any way hindered undocumented children’s access to school.

He also set aside an Eastern Cape education department 2016 circular warning that the department would fund only children at schools who had valid documentation.

Mbenenge said that all provisions of the Immigration Act had to be interpreted to be in line with the constitution. This meant that it had to be read in a way that meant that it in no way prohibited the provision of a basic education to illegal foreign children.

Judge Irma Schoeman and acting judge SM Mfenyana agreed with Mbenenge.

The ground-breaking case, which will have national implications, kicked off when some 37 children in the Eastern Cape were denied access to school because they had no birth certificates, study permits or passports.

The Centre for Child Law and Phakamisa High School in Port Elizabeth, represented by the Legal Resources Centre (LRC), set out to challenge all the regulations and laws that inhibited undocumented children from accessing basic education. They successfully argued that they constituted an unjustifiable limitation on children’s constitutional right to basic education as well as their right to equality and dignity.

In a statement issued in response to the high court ruling, the LRC said a common yet false perception was that undocumented pupils must be “illegal foreigners” as all SA children have their births registered and are in possession of an identity document.

“According to the department of basic education, 998,433 children are currently attending school in SA, are undocumented, and cannot be accounted for by the department of home affairs. Only 16.7% of these learners are foreign nationals, while 83.2% are SA children whose parents, guardians or caregivers have not managed to secure birth certificates for them.

"... Many of these learners are growing up with extended family members who struggle to obtain the necessary documentation for the children when their parents are no longer around. The children are often born at home and their births are not registered within 30 days as provided for in the Birth and Death Registration Act. This is either due to a lack of resources to travel to the nearest home affairs office, or due to an inability to produce all the documents that are required by Home Affairs to register a birth.

"... This judgment is therefore predominantly affecting SA children who, through no fault of their own, are unable to secure the registration of their births.”

The Equal Education Law Centre hailed the judgment, describing it as a “phenomenal victory for children across SA”. The centre also shared that late last month, it had secured placement of more than 100 children in Matatiele for the 2020 academic year. The children were out of school due to lack of identity documentation.

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As more than 100 home-bound, desperate Australians boarded a rescue flight at London's Heathrow Airport on Thursday in Melbourne the Torres family from Colombia prepared for another day of purgatory on their "holiday", six months-long and counting.

"It’s a little difficult," says Clara Torres from her nephew's two-bedroom Caulfield apartment where she, her sister, Amparo, and 90-year old mother Ines have slept on mattresses on the floor of the spare room for half a year.

Each day is much the same for the three – breakfast, a bit of exercise, read, call the family in Colombia – followed by a COVID-safe walk to the park and home again to her nephew John and his partner Carla's apartment.

The Colombian trio saved up for the trip of a lifetime to visit their nephew after he moved to Australia 10 years ago. They arrived in Melbourne at the start of February for what was meant to be a two-month stay.

But in mid-March, with escalating coronavirus case numbers worldwide, Colombia shut its borders with no warning, and the Torres family's return tickets were cancelled.

International flights into Colombia didn't resume until September 21, but LATAM airlines is still not operating flights in or out of Australia.

"When our ticket was cancelled, [we] were a little shocked," Ms Torres said. "But when they cancelled, we did not assume it [was] going to be this long."

The Torres family are among thousands of stranded holidaymakers in the country. According to the Department of Home Affairs, there are more than 82,000 visitor visa holders still in Australia. Among those, more than 3000 have applied for the government's "pandemic event" visa which allows people to stay after their visas expire.

There have been a handful of humanitarian flights sent to Australia to pick up citizens from different countries, but for the trio the cost was prohibitive.

"Each flight had a different cost, the cheapest was $3000 per person, but with additional costs it was more like $4500 per person," said Carla Peixoto, who has been hosting her partner's family.

“They’ve only got about $2000 [in savings] left and so they’ve not even got enough for one ticket."

Ms Peixoto said the many months of working from home, uncertainty and close quarters living with her partner's family had been "very stressful mentally and emotionally".

"It's been a very big learning curve, especially with the lockdown," she said.

The Torres family say their only hope of returning home is to wait for LATAM flights to resume so they can use their pre-paid ticket.

Clara and sister Amparo work in the middle of the night to try to keep their real estate business afloat back home, but they say their income does not count for much when converted to Australian dollars. It is not enough to pay for a new ticket home, or a complicated trip through various countries and quarantine programs.

"[People think] maybe you have a lot of money to come to Australia but no one knows the number of sacrifices we made to come here," Clara said.

The Colombian embassy has issued the family two supermarket vouchers throughout the six months to assist with grocery bills, but there's been little other support from their home country.

A Department of Home Affairs spokesperson said the government had allocated $7 million in funding to Red Cross to provide emergency relief to temporary visa holders.

"Temporary visa holders are also able to access relief services from other community organisations, receiving a total of $200 million in new funding," the spokesperson said.

Until flights resume, Clara said the trio were trying to stay positive and make the best of their bizarre situation.

"It was about 2½ months before I decided to be calm," she said. "Don’t think too much, that’s the clue, because you don’t know what is going to happen.

"Melbourne is a beautiful city. When I come back to Colombia, I will have many stories to tell my family."

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A self-employed salon and internet café operator based in Piet Retief, Mpumalanga, has been sentenced to an effective six years behind bars for selling fake tertiary qualifications.

Edmond Okechuku, 45, appeared in the Piet Retief Magistrate's Court on Monday for sentencing on charges of fraud, forgery and manufacturing false tertiary qualification certificates.

According to Hawks spokesperson Captain Dineo Lucy Sekgotodi, Okechuku was arrested by the Hawks' Serious Organised Crime Investigation team in Mpumalanga on 16 October 2019 during an intelligence-driven operation after information was received about the sale of fake tertiary certificates.

He was released on bail of R2 000 on 24 October 2019.

During the operation, he was approached by a police agent who needed an N6 Human Resources certificate, for which he charged R1 500. Okechuku pleaded guilty on all charges.

Subsequently, the Piet Retief Magistrate's Court sentenced him to six years' direct imprisonment. He was denied leave to appeal the sentence and declared unfit to possess a firearm.

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South Africa has special rules for visiting business people, starting with them not being subject to SA's red list.

• They have also been cleared to try to argue their case on arrival, if they arrive from a red-listed country without the right paperwork.
• For those from neighbouring countries who need multiple entry into SA, the negative PCR test that must be no more than 72 hours old at the time of arrival will be accepted for two weeks afterwards.
• No coronavirus test is required for those just passing through.
• Here's what we know about the details of South Africa's travel rules for incoming businesspeople.

Bsiness people seeking entry into South Africa will get special treatment at borders, home affairs minister Aaron Motsoaledi has confirmed, beyond not being subjected to South Africa's red list.

That list, of countries from which leisure travellers are not welcome, has never applied to those travelling for business, on the basis that SA needs all the economic activity it can get. Policymakers seem intent to maintain that stance, so that South Africa's borders will remain open to those travelling on business regardless of how severe the coronavirus pandemic gets in their country of origin.

Businesspeople who travel from or via high-risk countries on the red list are supposed to apply for entry into SA before they depart – but if they don't, they'll be able to beg for entry when reaching the border.

"Immigration officers have been instructed to apply the requirements with a measure of flexibility in order to allow applications for business travel to be lodged at the ports of entry if and when necessary and await the outcome before entry into the Republic is allowed," said Motsoaledi in a statement.

That exception is expected to be useful mostly for those travelling by road – because anyone who fails to convince the government their travel is for business would be turned around. For flyers, the onus would be on the airline who let the passenger onto their plane in the first place to remove that person from South Africa.

Business travellers from neighbouring countries will also get special treatment when it comes to testing. Every person who enters SA must, on arrival, present a negative coronavirus test no more than 72 hours old. But for businesspeople from the 15 other Southern African Development Community (SADC) countries, those test certificates will be considered valid for 14 days afterwards.

That means those who need to cross the border regularly will have multiple entry as long as they meet the 72-hour requirement the first time they enter, Motsoaledi's department confirmed to Business Insider South Africa.

The department of home affairs also confirmed that:

• Travellers who transit through South Africa do not need to produce a negative coronavirus test in order to pass through.
• The airline doesn't matter, when it comes to the red list, only the country from which a tourist is coming, or through which they have passed.
• The intention remains to update the red list every two weeks

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