Home Affairs adamant on child travel laws

THE Department of Home Affairs says it will go ahead with the controversial implementation of new travel regulations for children despite ongoing calls for them to be placed on hold.

From Monday, all children travelling to or from South Africa will have to do so with an unabridged birth certificate – or their country’s version of one – as well as both parents’ permission to travel.

Briefing parliament’s Home Affairs portfolio committee yesterday, director-general Mkuseli Apleni said the implementation would be going ahead.

The DA intends to protest against the regulations with a picket in Cape Town today.

Apleni said the regulations were introduced to protect children, specifically from child trafficking. According to the new regulations:

Parents travelling with their children must produce the children’s unabridged birth certificates;

If the second parent is not listed on the birth certificate, their consent is not required. If single parents did list the other parent, it is;

If, in the case of divorce, custody is shared, both parents’ consent is required;

If consent is being withheld, this needs to be dealt with by the courts first;

Parents who do not know the whereabouts of the other parent will also have to approach the courts;

Those travelling with a child who is not their biological child need the certificate as well as an affidavit from the parents giving consent;

Exemptions will apply where a parent has died just days before consent could be given and a death certificate has not yet been issued, or where a parent is mentally or physically ill and cannot sign. The remaining parent must take a doctor’s certificate to the director-general’s office to apply for exemption; and Parents of adopted children are required to travel with the adoption certificate.

Apleni said about 2.7 million children travelled into and out of South Africa last year.

South Africa has issued unabridged birth certificates to all children since March 2013, so all children born between 1996 and February 2013 would be required to apply for such a certificate – about 17 million children.

However, Apleni said, of these, only 1.1 million had valid South African passports allowing them to travel.

A further 86 387 children, born between January and June 1996, had already turned 18 and would not require the certificate. The department was working with a figure of just more than one million children who could potentially require certificates.

About 550 000 of these children would require the certificate should they need to travel but no application had yet been made for these.

Apleni said the department could cope with the workload, as it was regularly issuing passports in a turnaround time of about 13 days and new birth registrations were issued with the unabridged certificate “on the spot”.

The department guaranteed that the certificates would be ready in the six-to-eight-week turnaround time. If not, it would provide a letter allowing the child to travel, he said..

As at May 18, there were 5 674 applications for the certificates still within the turnaround period. The department was confident of issuing all certificates for which parents had applied, by the June 1 start date. The backlog of certificates outside the turnaround period was 9 112.

DA MP James Vos however called on the department to halt the implementation, saying the knock-on effect on the tourism industry and job creation would be catastrophic.

He challenged the department’s claims of 30 000 children trafficked annually.

Apleni said one trafficked child was too many.

“We want to prevent the loss of even one child.”