The Department of Home Affairs will appear before Parliament to answer questions about statelessness and assistance to refugees, as well as issues concerning DNA testing.

This follows the committee chair’s decision that they will have to respond to questions put to them by Lawyers for Human Rights (LHR). This emerged on Tuesday during a meeting of Parliament’s Home Affairs oversight committee, with LHR, on migrant issues.

Lindokuhle Mdabe, head of migrant and refugee projects at LHR’s Johannesburg office, said they wanted the Home Affairs department to look at several issues affecting migrants in South Africa.

Mdabe said a new system dealing with asylum seekers was introduced earlier this year, but that LHR experiences revealed, among other issues, a lack of accessibility, lack of internet access and language barriers. There were also two-month waiting periods for interviews and a shortage of interpreters.

Mdabe said the two-month waiting periods meant refugees and migrants were rendered “vulnerable to detention because of their [lack of] documents”.

Mdabe said there was no public information available indicating the number of people arrested and detained for purposes of deportation; the number of people deported from South Africa, and the number of people arrested and charged for contravening section 49 of the Immigration Act. 

LHR wanted the Home Affairs department to make this information available, dating back three years.

Stateless persons and DNA testing 

During her presentation, Thandeka Chauke, head of the Statelessness Project at the LHR’s Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme, raised the issue of statelessness — where a person is not recognised as a citizen of any country.

Chauke told the committee there were about 10,000 stateless people in South Africa, including unrecognised South Africans and migrants. 

Another issue she touched on was the cost of DNA testing for birth registrations, which could lead to statelessness.

Chauke said DNA testing in SA was “arbitrary, discriminatory and exclusionary”.

She mentioned a departmental circular which stipulated that where a Home Affairs official has “reasonable suspicion” regarding the paternity of a child, proof of paternity is required — in the form of DNA tests — if one parent is not a South African citizen.

This, she said, was a form of discrimination against children born to non-South Africans. Chauke also pointed out that, at R750, the test was expensive for poor families.

The LHR recommended the department ensure birth registrations of all children born in South Africa, regardless of parents’ documentation or immigration status. Arbitrary or discriminatory barriers to birth registrations, such as expensive DNA testing, needed to be removed. 

Responding to the LHR, ANC MP Kavilan Pillay said DNA testing was not discriminatory as South African nationals also had to pay for such tests. EFF MP, Thapelo Mogale, asked the LHR what was the best way to deal with the issue of DNA testing as the pricing was “unfair to those who cannot afford it”.

Several MPs said the department needed to respond to the issues raised by the LHR.