Unabridged birth certificates in spotlight
THE DEPARTMENT of Home Affairs has received 185 641 applications for unabridged birth certificates within 13 months, according to a parliamentary reply.
Children under 18 require unabridged birth certificates to travel from South Africa following changes in the visa regimen which have been sharply criticised by many in the tourism industry and some opposition parties. The government maintains the measures were taken to protect against child trafficking.
Gauteng leads with 75 685 applications processed and/or ready for collection between May 1 last year and May 31 this year, according to the parliamentary reply, followed by KwaZuluNatal (39 952) and the Western Cape (33 467).
Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba said the department’s performance indicators showed it should take between six to eight weeks to issue the unabridged birth certificate. Meanwhile, it emerged that, as of June 19, there were 18 739 foreign children in South Africa whose permits or visas had expired, according to Home Affairs’ enhanced movement control system. “The above persons may have obtained extensions of their permits that will only be reflected on the enhanced movement control system on their departure,” Gigaba said, adding a total of 29 476 foreign children arrived in, but have not yet departed from, South Africa as of June 19.
While the DA parliamentary question was phrased in the context of child trafficking, Gigaba did not mention child trafficking in his reply. Instead he said Home Affairs officials visited three social development-run shelters every three months to obtain information via social workers to identify and conduct interviews with the “victims” to discover why and how they came to South Africa. “Where necessary, the department assists such victims with the process of repatriation,” Gigaba added.
DA MP Haniff Hoosen took a dim view of the ministerial reply: “This is the description of nothing more than a thumb-suck figure”.
The minister was pursuing “a distortion of the problem of child trafficking to save his own skin and legitimise visa regulations that have been widely criticised domestically and internationally”, Hoosen added. – Marianne Merten