SA under fire for refugee figures

SOUTH Africa has been singled out for the skewed figures representing the latest global asylum seeker population‚ according to the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCR).

The UNHCR 2016 report for Global Trends on displacement‚ released yesterday, showed that the number of asylum seekers in South Africa had dropped by nearly 900 000 in just one year.

South Africa moved down to fourth in the world – behind Germany‚ the US and Turkey – for its asylum seeker population‚ which was recorded at 218 300 in the latest report‚ down from 1.1 million in 2015.

The asylum seeker population is made up of people with pending claims for refugee status‚ and stood at 2.8 million globally at the end of last year.

That was a decrease from 3.2-million in 2015‚ but the drop was mainly accounted for by a sharp reduction in the asylumseeker population reported by South Africa‚ the report said.

Home Affairs spokesman Thabo Mokgola said the number of asylum seekers in South Africa had not dropped.

The department, he said, had reported both inactive and active cases to the UNHCR‚ who had then only considered people who were active. “The reporting only focused on the active cases‚” he said.

The report said that South Africa received 35 400 new individual asylum claims last year.

Most came from Zimbabwe‚ followed by the Democratic Republic of Congo and Ethiopia.

Advocacy officer Corey Johnson, of the Scalabrini Centre of Cape Town‚ an NGO which aids refugees‚ said the drop in reported active numbers showed that the system pushed people into irregularity.

He identified the closure of refugee resettlement offices as a major cause of asylum seekers not keeping their documents up to date.