Zims in SA suffer as Jhb centre closes

The order is the third of its kind in 10 years and once again leaves the capital city, where the largest number of refugees is located, without an office to deal with them. The move has been condemned by several civil rights movements. The international watchdog Human Rights Watch said it would cause hardship to tens of thousands of asylum seekers living there most of them Zimbabweans.
HRW said the closure of Crown Mines, the only refugee reception centre in Johannesburg, would expose the thousands of asylum seekers to the risk of being deported to face persecution at home. Refugee rights groups have also warned that previous closures of refugee reception offices had resulted in lost files and other problems that interfered with asylum seekers ability to get services, including permit renewal, in an already chronically overburdened asylum system.
South Africa has the worlds largest number of registered asylum seekers, most of them Zimbabweans. The numbers have risen steadily over the past six years. There were 20,000 new applications in 2005, 50,000 in 2007, and 264,000 in 2008, with similar numbers in 2010. Despite recent attempts to improve its asylum system, there is a backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases.
Hundreds of desperate Zimbabweans were left stranded on Monday, when the centre closed without notice and left them having to travel to Pretoria to make their applications. Some people had been given appointments by the officials here, who pretended that everything was normal, only to find the place closed when they came to honour those appointments, said Joshua Rusere of the Zimbabwe Political Victims Association.
The officials should have at least made an announcement or put up posters warning their clients of the imminent closure. As a result the refugees, most of who do not have access to television and newspapers, were left in the open. This is inhuman treatment of people. HRW said the South African government should extend its moratorium on deportations of Zimbabweans until Johannesburg has a functioning refugee reception centre.
In the two years before South Africa suspended deportations of Zimbabweans in April 2009, police deported an estimated 400,000 Zimbabweans, including asylum seekers who had been unable to lodge their claims, said Siphokazi Mthathi, South Africa director at HRW, in a statement.
International law prohibits the deportation of refugees and asylum seekers whose safety could be at risk. The government is obliged to protect anyone seeking asylum in South Africa and the closing of the centre is a serious blow to those already struggling to get protection in a dysfunctional system. Refugees are now forced to make a 140 km round trip to Pretoria to lodge claims or renew their permits to remain in South Africa, at huge financial and other personal cost, including the risk of losing their jobs.