The Constitutional Court is expected to issue directions ”very soon” on the fate of people living in camps for refugees from xenophobic violence, a legal adviser said on Thursday.
The camps are due to be closed on Friday.
”There was a meeting at the Constitutional Court today [Thursday] between all the parties and we hope and expect the directions will come out very soon,” said Stuart Wilson, one of the lawyers working on the application to keep the camps open.
The Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa, with the Wits Law Clinic, unsuccessfully applied to the Pretoria High Court to keep the camps open until a ”proper” reintegration plan was produced, so they approached the Constitutional Court for relief.
Wilson said it would be an act of ”extreme disrespect” for the Constitutional Court were the camps to be closed down before the court had issued directives, even though the government was not bound to keep them open just because an application was made.
The Gauteng government has said it will close all the shelters in the province and about 2 500 people still living there must leave. It believes conditions are safe in the communities from which these people fled when xenophobic violence left more than 60 people dead in May and displaced thousands of people.
Contingency plans
The South African Red Cross Society (SARCS) said it needed to know more about the government’s contingency plans for Friday, so that it could plan ahead for its own relief efforts.
Although the society had its own contingency plan, its secretary general, Mandisa Kalako-Williams, said: ”There is no government plan to say [for example], ‘From this point they will go by bus.”’
As thousands of people became displaced by attacks on foreign nationals in May, the NGO was one of many that helped with food, counselling, clothing, tracing relatives and mattresses, based on donations.
Kalako-Williams thanked the donors of the R14-million the Red Cross had received to be able to do this.
Its own contingency plans include increasing support to churches that have been helping displaced people, providing support within the communities to which people will return and contacting its international sister bodies to ask for help if people are repatriated.
Gauteng government spokesperson Thabo Masebe said it had a contingency plan if the estimated 2 500 people didn’t leave the shelters, but would not say what it was.
”Many have said they will be gone by tonight,” said Masebe.
Alexis Moens, Johannesburg project coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières, said: ”Nobody has moved. People have no place to go.”
Task team
A parliamentary task team has also proposed that the camps remain open for further consultation, saying some issues had not been cleared up. Masebe said he had not received a copy of the task team’s proposal yet.
Earlier in the week he had said that if people did not move from the site, they would be trespassing.
In July, more than 200 men taken from the Glenanda shelter to the Lindela repatriation centre and released a few weeks ago were arrested on a traffic violation when they camped on the side of the road. They said they had nowhere else to go.
They were released from jail and taken back to Lindela, where they were having their documentation processed, with more than 60 families having opted for voluntary repatriation, said Department of Home Affairs spokesperson Siobhan McCarthy.
Brakpan’s police said they would help people who wanted to go back to their original areas. Captain Petros Mabuza said they were planning to help reintegrate refugees back into the community of Tsakane.
Mabuza said: ”We will go with them back into the community, we will make sure that they gain access into their houses and that they are safe.” — Sapa