The minister of safety and security must pay a teenage boy R90 000 in damages after the boy was almost deported to Mozambique despite his protests that he was a South African.
Police insisted the boy was "too dark to be a South African" and locked him up for 30 hours with 24 men who were due to be deported to Mozambique.
Shane Mhaule, who is now 18, was 14 then. The Pretoria High Court heard that he was hysterical when the police were about to load him on a truck back to his "homeland".
He told the police he didn't know anyone in Mozambique but they wouldn't listen to his mother's pleas or take his South African birth certificate into consideration. They were adamant that he was a Mozambican who had to be deported. His saving grace was a local journalist who intervened on behalf of his family.
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| 'The evidence clearly indicates that he was humiliated, degraded and belittled' |
Shane's mother Kate Obo initially claimed R500 000 in damages from the police for the trauma her son had to go through.
In his judgment on Monday Judge Willie Seriti said it was clear his arrest and subsequent detention was unlawful.
He said: "The conditions under which he was detained were unbearable and atrocious. It must have been traumatic. The evidence clearly indicates that he was humiliated, degraded and belittled."
Shane testified that he had left his home in Bushbuckridge to go to the private English school he attended in Tembisa, when the taxi he was travelling in was stopped at a roadblock. Police demanded his ID, but he told them he was too young to have one.
He told them he was on his way to school, but they ordered him into the back of a police van, together with nine adults. This was in spite of the taxi driver telling the police he knew the boy and offering to call his parents. When Shane asked to call home, police told him "it is impossible". He was thrown into a police cell with 24 men and couldn't sleep that night as the cell was overcrowded and he had only enough space to sit.
He said one of the detainees next to him kept whispering into his ear, but he couldn't understand what he was saying. Shane told the court that he was very scared.
He was loaded into a truck the next day and taken to Nelspruit.
He was later released into the custody of his mother, who was with a journalist.
The journalist, Riot Hlatshwayo, who worked for African Eye News Services, testified that the boy's mother called him to tell him her son was about to be deported to Maputo.
She also said she called the police station, but a police officer told her there was nothing he could do as the boy was already on the truck to Mozambique.
Hlatshwayo went to the police station and was referred to the department of home affairs. There he was told "the child is too dark to be South African".
This, he said, was in spite of the child's mother producing his birth certificate. He said it was only after he told the officials he was a journalist that they released the boy.
The police officer who arrested the boy, an Inspector Baloyi, said Shane never produced any identification and did not answer the questions the police asked him.
He also said Shane spoke "Mozambican Shangaan" and he believed he was about 18.
The judge said he found this version to be "highly improbable" as the boy would not refuse to give the police the particulars of his parents.
He said if he was allowed to call home, everything would have been cleared up.
- This article was originally published on page 1 of Pretoria News on March 11, 2008
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