Helen Suzman Foundation to challenge termination of Zim permits
The Helen Suzman Foundation has turned to the courts in an attempt to reverse the decision of Minister of Home Affairs Aaron Motsoaledi to terminate the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP).
This after the Minster in the Presidency Mondli Gungubele had confirmed that the exemption permit will come to an end on 31 December this year.
Gungubele said cabinet had agreed on a 12-month grace period at the expiry of the current permit, after which people without permits will be deported.
The foundation’s Nicole Fritz says the decision will impact some 178 000 Zimbabwean nationals who live, work and study in the country.
"This special dispensation regime has offered legal protection to approximately 178 000 Zimbabwean nationals allowing them to live, work and study in South Africa. It has prevailed for well over a decade, meaning that permit-holders have built lives, families and careers here and contributed to South Africa and its economy."
Fritz says it means Zimbabwean nationals will either need to remain in South Africa as undocumented migrants or return to their homeland.
"They will be put to a desperate choice: to remain in South Africa as undocumented migrants with all the vulnerability that attaches to such status or return to a Zimbabwe that, to all intents and purposes, is unchanged from the country they fled. There are thousands of children who have been born in South Africa to ZEP holders during this time who have never even visited their parents’ country of origin.
"It is not the position of HSF that those migrants who are in South Africa unlawfully should be entitled to remain, nor even that the ZEP must continue in perpetuity."
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