Cape Town - The refugees occupying the streets around the Central Methodist Mission in Greenmarket Square are hoping to have a last-minute negotiation with the City of Cape Town in a bid to get temporary shelter when the City’s by-laws evicting them from their camp in the streets is effected.
Meanwhile, the City gave no indication of their plans for the refugees as the seven-day court-ordered verification process comes to an end on Friday.
Mayco Member for Safety and Security, JP Smith said: “As indicated before, the City is committed to resolving the matter as speedily as possible, in line with the court order, and we ask that the public will allow the Department of Home Affairs and the City to give effect to the order.”
One of the refugees who has been living on Burg Street, outside the back entrance of Newspaper House, Ismael Kazadi said: “The way things are going now, we don’t know what will happen. We hope they will give us temporary accommodation and maybe we can negotiate this with the City when they come to enforce their by-laws.”
A post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Public Law at Stellenbosch University, Callixte Kavuro said: “The refugees at Methodist Church should cooperate with local authorities. The obligations of a refugee or an asylum seeker set out in the Refugees Act include: to respect South African laws and regulations. They can challenge any particular unjust policy through judicial review.”
“Once you are recognised as a refugee in a country, you cannot seek asylum in another country, unless assisted to do so by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), through a resettlement process. This takes place when your life is under threat in the host country and the only solution available is to go to another country.”
Kavuro, whose area of research is forced migration, said: “This is not the case with refugees in Cape Town at the Methodist Church. They generally base the threats to their life on the xenophobic violence, which targets all foreign nationals. If they are heard on this basis, a precedent is set that all refugees and asylum seekers should be removed from South Africa.
"On the contrary, whilst they are protesting, other refugees, asylum seekers and economic migrants are running businesses in local communities. They are staying, working, and studying in the local communities.”