17/07/2026
A run up to Madela in South Africa 18 July 2026. And this is what Human Rights look like in his Beautiful Country. He fought for this Country and died for it. To make it a better place , for all who live in it.
Question is ,what does human rights look like in South African today?
https://www.news24.com/opinions/columnists/opinion-this-is-what-human-rights-focused-looks-like-20260715-0846
OPINION | This is what 'human rights focused' looks like
3h ago • Rebecca Walker and Sharon Ekambaram
The state's version of human rights is to terrify people into fleeing, herd them to the border under tents pitched in mud, let them cross with only what they can carry — then photograph the water being handed out and the mobile clinics parked nearby as "evidence" of a rights-based approach, write Rebecca Walker and Sharon Ekambaram.
Earlier this week, Home Affairs Director-General Livhuwani Makhode told Parliament's Portfolio Committee on Home Affairs that the department's operation at the Musina repatriation centres reflects "our approach on human rights and humanitarian principles."
By Wednesday, after a two-day visit, the committee concluded the facilities were "lawful, organised and humane", and one of its own members, Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos, went further still, praising the speed of the build and crediting it to his own party's ministers, Leon Schreiber and Dean Macpherson — a department under review, assessed by a member of the minister's own party, on a committee whose chair was simultaneously vouching for its constitutional compliance.
The verdict landed in the same 48-hour window in which Amnesty International South Africa was warning that women, children and other vulnerable people at the site faced shortages of potable water and medical supplies, inadequate protection against disease, and a heightened risk of gender-based violence and exploitation. That warning came before the committee reported back, and yet the committee's conclusion doesn't engage with a single one of those risks.
Nobody seriously disputes the facts on the ground; even government's own allies barely contest them. What is on offer instead is a claim of compliance never tested against the allegations put to it.
A problem to be processed
The latest figure for people processed for "repatriation" or "deportation" is a staggering 53 000 – a number government, opposition parties and vigilante groups will each find their own reasons to celebrate. But that figure isn't the story unfolding on the ground: families fragmented, children left behind as police arrived at doors and ordered people to leave, or as men carrying knobkerries stalked the streets outside; businesses standing empty, spaza shops taken over by people without the networks to run them.
People were expelled, not repatriated or deported in any considered legal sense, but forced out at a speed that left no room for documents, backgrounds, circumstances or belongings. Everyone became the same problem, treated as the same threat – a crackdown falling overwhelmingly on black African migrants, a pointed irony given South Africa's own history of Pan-African solidarity to win its freedom.
In 1962, Nelson Mandela addressed the Pan-African Freedom Movement of East and Central Africa to thank the continent for backing South Africa's liberation struggle. Six decades on, the country that leaned on that solidarity to win its own freedom is the one now failing to extend it.
How is it that when it's load shedding, poor service delivery, or the struggle to get an ID at Home Affairs, we refuse to accept the lies and demand accountability from government, but when it's migrants, the fact that it's the government's own dysfunctional documentation system that manufactures much of that "illegality" goes conveniently ignored?
In the operation's early days, Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said anyone found without status would have their biometrics recorded and be declared undesirable "in terms of the Immigration Act", with no mention of first establishing who held a valid asylum permit, a pending appeal, or long-standing residence, undone by paperwork rather than fact.
This government keeps making promises it has no intention of keeping.
Ten days before the 30 June deadline, Lawyers for Human Rights, acting for Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, forced a written government commitment out of an urgent High Court application: on 26 June the minister of justice agreed, in open court, that no private person may demand another person's immigration documents, that blocking access to schools, hospitals or clinics is unlawful, and that vigilantism "will not be tolerated".
However, 11 days later, at Vleifontein, SAPS itself helped a community group do precisely that. The government did not contest the order, appeal it, or explain the contradiction; it simply moved on, confident that no one would hold its own statements against it.
It has made the same promise again this week. Acting Police Minister Firoz Cachalia told a briefing in Pretoria that police had successfully maintained public safety during the 30 June protests while respecting the right to demonstrate, and warned that vigilantism "will not be tolerated" – the same phrase the minister of justice used in court on 26 June – adding that only the state has the authority to enforce the law.
That is exactly the authority SAPS handed to a community group at Vleifontein days earlier. The judiciary has said as much directly: in a Constitutional Court judgment on 7 July, Justice Steven Majiedt described the department's conduct as showing "remarkable gross ineptitude and egregious laxity", and reminded government that it "must do right, and it must do it properly".
Evictions with no court in sight
South Africa's Prevention of Illegal Eviction Act exists precisely to stop what routinely happened to black South Africans under apartheid-era law: landlords, municipalities or private actors removing people from their homes on their own authority. That protection has been treated as optional for two weeks running.
In Ashton and across the Boland, landlords ordered tenants out overnight, citing fear their properties would be targeted; more than 300 people ended up sheltering in a Robertson community hall. Similar evictions were reported in Pietermaritzburg and Durban. MSF said tens of thousands of people – many from Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Ghana – had fled their homes for fear for their safety and livelihoods.
The clearest case is in Limpopo, the province the department wants Parliament to believe is its human rights showcase. On 6 July, GroundUp reported SAPS members helping residents of Vleifontein, Maila and Kanana identify roughly 200 people believed to be foreign nationals and hand them to police, even though only law enforcement officers have any legal authority to demand immigration or citizenship documents from anyone. One woman described her door being kicked open before she and her three children were loaded into a police van and driven house to house as officers gathered up others.
Section 7(2) of the Constitution obliges the state to protect everyone within its borders, regardless of documentation. What happened at Vleifontein was the precise reverse: officers meant to prevent vigilante action assisted it instead. That is not a failure to protect – rather, the state actively facilitated harm it is constitutionally bound to prevent, and without apology. The officers involved need to be identified, investigated and disciplined.
No court considered any of this, and no landlord, community group or police officer has the standing to evict anyone without any. Yet Home Affairs describes the people arriving at Musina as voluntary participants in a rights-respecting process. There is nothing voluntary about a decision made because the administrative door has been closed for years, because police helped evict a family from its home, or because a mob threatened to kill them or burn a house. The Musina Council of Churches, and diaspora volunteer networks who arrived at a separate Limpopo police station with nappies and sanitary towels for more than a hundred women and children sleeping outside it – none of them funded or asked to do this. A bus ferrying people from KwaZulu-Natal to Musina crashed on the N1, killing the driver and injuring eleven passengers, in an accident blamed on driver fatigue – a direct casualty of the pace this operation has been run at. Tents erected in that 96-hour scramble were widely flagged as inadequate, and in Limpopo, there are landfill sites filled with suitcases, bags and clothing – precious possessions that people packed in a hurry and then were told they had to leave behind.
This is the state's version of human rights: terrify people into fleeing, herd them to the border under tents pitched in mud, let them cross with only what they can carry – then photograph the water being handed out and the mobile clinics parked nearby as "evidence" of a rights-based approach. All of this is happening to women, men and children, including babies, in the middle of a South African winter. There is nothing right about any of it.
Disregard for human life, disregard for black lives
None of this is new. At Lindela, the country's main immigration detention centre, years of overcrowding and neglect forced a 2014 Human Rights Commission investigation prompted by external organisations, not Home Affairs. Musina repeats that pattern, larger and faster. The scrutiny gap isn't only domestic: Malawi's own Human Rights Commission formally wrote to the SAHRC requesting information on the safety and treatment of its nationals. As of the letter's release, it had received no response.
South Africa ratified OPCAT, the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture, in 2019 and designated the SAHRC as the National Preventive Mechanism required to monitor anywhere where a person can be deprived of their liberty. On that definition, the buses became places of detention. The embassies became places of detention. Lindela, horrifically, became a place of transit for pregnant women, children and babies. So, where is the National Preventive Mechanism South Africa itself promised to maintain? None are so blind as those who will not see.
The more serious allegations circulating among civil society and legal monitors – mothers separated from young children, babies a few days old, people signing documents they can't read, no interpretation available – cannot be resolved by a two-day, guided visit. They require a standing, independent mechanism with real access: the Human Rights Commission acting in full as the NPM it is meant to be, the Public Protector, civil society and legal observers, mandated to recommend real consequences, including reprimand or prosecution, for any officer who facilitated an eviction instead of preventing one.
South Africa has every lawful basis to run an orderly repatriation process. It does not have the right to call that process rights-compliant when the evidence, from those leaving and those left to patch the gaps the state itself created, says otherwise. None of this appears to trouble the department enough to pause, let alone apologise, which is its own answer to what "human rights focused" actually means here.
The government's obligation was never really in question: protect everyone within its borders, documented or not, and stay out of the business of forcing them from their homes. "Human rights", in this telling, is just a phrase, claimed by the people least entitled to it, and, in practice, proven by the people who never asked for the credit.
· Dr Rebecca Walker is a senior research consultant at Wits University's African Centre for Migration & Society.
· Sharon Ekambaram is with Lawyers for Human Rights.
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The state’s version of human rights is to terrify people into fleeing, herd them to the border under tents pitched in mud, let them cross with only what they can carry – then photograph the water being handed out and the mobile clinics parked nearby as “evidence” of a rights-based approach, ...
