Cape Town - The Department of Home Affairs is looking at relocating refugee centres closer to the country's borders where most refugees enter, the Deputy Minister of Home Affairs, Fatima Chohan, said today.
Chohan, briefing the National Assembly's portfolio committee on home affairs on the country's refugee centres, said it would be more practical to have refugee centres closer to borders because a provision in the amended Immigration Bill - currently before Parliament - held that asylum seekers entering the country had to apply for refugee status within five days.
However, she said a final decision to relocate the centres closer to the borders had not yet been taken, as a process of rationalising the country's entry points was still on the go, she said.
The department also needed to draft a blueprint indicating what such refugee centres should contain as such facilities didn't exist near borders.
According to the department, about 95 percent of asylum seekers enter South Africa through Mozambique or Zimbabwe - either illegally through border fences, or at border entry points.
The department has also had to relocate at least one of its five refugee centres because businesses had complained that refugees were a nuisance for clients and their operations.
While a court order on March 25 had forced the department to relocate its refugee centre in Johannesburg to the Pretoria showgrounds, the Cape High Court has ordered the department to move out of its Maitland refugee centre.
The department is now leasing the building on a month-to-month basis until it finds an alternative location.
Businesses in Musina and Port Elizabeth have also indicated to the department that they intend seeking court orders to close down refugee centres located there.
Chohan admitted that in the rush to set up refugee centres, the department had not thought carefully enough about the implications about where the centres would be situated, which had led to the court challenges.
Meanwhile, she said the department was looking at overhauling the asylum management process, which would take affect when the Immigration Bill is made law.
The department is also looking at updating its IT systems so that accurate statistics of those seeking refugee status - including their origin - could be produced at the touch of a button.
The deputy minister said there was a trend worldwide of countries reneging on conditions laid out in the 1951 and 1967 UN conventions on refugee rights, but pointed out that South Africa however had not skimped on any rights refugees are entitled too.
She said the department was "deeply committed" to eradicating any form of corruption at refugee centres or other home affairs offices - pointing to the numerous court cases of corruption with which the department is dealing.
"We must remember that we are dealing with very desperate people (refugees) and there, there is fertile ground for corruption," she said.
Meanwhile, following a visit to the Cape Town refugee centre yesterday, committee members complained that the centre was leaking, cold and disorganised in terms of how applicants queued, which might be contributing to the high rate of employee absenteeism and vacancies of positions.
Jackson McKay, the department's chief director of asylum seeker management, said the Maitland refugee centre in Cape Town had been procured in haste, after the department was forced to move out of its Nyanga refugee centre in 2009 after a court order.
The plan had been to set up a purpose-built building for the refugee centre.
During the six-month period that it was expected to take for the centre to be completed, the service provider found a temporary location for the centre.
However, when the court challenge came along, the building of the new centre was put on hold.
The department was still looking for a new centres and had looked at more than 10 possibilities, but objections from businesses at each of these sites or police because of safety issues, had arisen.
Officials from the department had also met with the sector's trade union after officials had threatened to go on strike over working conditions - including the building being too cold.
The department had explained to the union that the current Cape Town site was only a temporary one and had brought in heaters to tackle the cold.
