Applying for asylum

The Refugees Amendment Act requires an asylum seeker to report to a Refugee Reception Office no later than five days after arriving in South Africa – or they can be excluded from refugee status. Furthermore, those who do not have an ‘asylum transit visa’ will be interviewed by an immigration officer to determine whether they have ‘valid reasons’ for not holding this transit visa. In the daily work of Scalabrini, asylum applicants often report difficulties in entering a Refugee Reception Office and applying for asylum. Five days to apply for asylum is not realistic – and we expressed concern in the submissions that denying someone an application to asylum simply because they apply on the sixth day is not in line with international refugee law. Given the current backlogs and protracted adjudication processes, this provision could create significant burdens for asylum seekers – and extra layers of administration for the Department of Home Affairs.

Under the Refugees Amendment Act asylum seekers will have to declare all existing dependents family upon their first application in order to have them documented in their asylum file. For those fleeing conflicts in stressful conditions, and with limited English, ensuring all family members are on the asylum application is not necessarily simple. In the submissions, we suggested that family members can be joined into an asylum file at a later date, along with proof of their relationship to the applicant.