SA Migration International

News Articles

Barring foreign nationals from being admitted to legal profession not unconstitutional - ConCourt

Source: News24, 03/08/2022

• In September 2021, the Free State High Court declared Section 24(2) of the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 unconstitutional and invalid.
• The matter was brought by foreign nationals who wanted to be admitted and enrolled as legal practitioners in South Africa.
• On Tuesday, the Constitutional Court declined to confirm the constitutional invalidity.
A group of foreign nationals, who were fighting to be admitted and enrolled as legal practitioners in South Africa, but lack permanent residency, lost their bid in the Constitutional Court on Tuesday.
The court dismissed the group`s leave to appeal against a Free State High Court judgment.
It also declined to confirm that Section 24(2) of the Legal Practice Act 28 of 2014 (LPA) was unconstitutional and invalid to the extent that it did not allow foreigners to be admitted and authorised to enroll as non-practising legal practitioners.
In September last year, the Free State High Court in Bloemfontein declared that section unconstitutional and invalid, but found the discrimination in Section 24(2)(b) of the LPA was fair.
One of the applications was brought by Relebohile Cecilia Rafoneke and Sefoboko Phillip Tsuinyane, both Lesotho nationals, who wanted to practice in South Africa.
Another was brought by Zimbabwe nationals Bruce Chakanyuka, Nyasha James Nyamugure and Dennis Tatenda Chayda, as well as an asylum seeker refugee and migrant coalition, all facing the same issues as Rafoneke and Tsuinyane.
The respondents were the justice and correctional services minister and the Legal Practice Council.
Rafoneke and Tsuinyane both studied at the University of the Free State, where they obtained LLB degrees.
They entered into contracts of articles of clerkship, completed vocational training, and passed the practical examination for attorneys.
When they applied to be admitted and enrolled as attorneys of the high court, their applications were dismissed because they were neither South African citizens nor lawfully admitted to this country as permanent residents.

Search

Latest News

As a South African who has adopted a nomadic work lifestyle alongside my wife, Ingrid Lotze, I’ve been an interested observer of South Africa’s snail-pace digital nomad visa (DNV) development process. Despite the optimism surrounding its introduction, the visa seems to miss several crucial marks for digital nomads like us.... Read more...

EREMY MAGGS: I want to stay with crime now. Individuals with a criminal record may be faced with significant challenges when seeking employment, I think that’s a given. Here in South Africa, employers may legally exclude an applicant from consideration for a position if having a clean criminal record is what is termed an inherent requirement of the job. That phrase, inherent requirement, is important, but what exactly does that mean, and when can an applicant be lawfully excluded for having a criminal record?... Read more...

There are fears that more people will be separated by the introduction of a minimum salary level for those wanting UK family visas. Families living in the UK and abroad have raised concerns about what new rules will mean for them as they try to reunite with foreign spouses. In December, the Home Office, which says migration to the UK is too high, announced a package of measures to reduce net migration, following a spike in arrival numbers.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail.Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

An Ethiopian asylum seeker, who does not speak English, claims he was duped by a senior immigration official into paying an admission of guilt fine when he thought he was paying for bail. Two Western Cape High Court judges have condemned the official`s `deplorable` behaviour, set aside the fine, and ordered the immigration official be taken off the case. Tsegaye Esyas claims Annelise van Dyk treated him like an animal which led to him attempt suicide while in police cells.... Read more...

North Korean hackers have been exploiting the updating mechanism of the eScan antivirus to plant backdoors on big corporate networks and deliver cryptocurrency miners through GuptiMiner malware. Researchers describe GuptiMiner as `a highly sophisticated threat` that can perform DNS requests to the attacker`s DNS servers, extract payloads from images, sign its payloads, and perform DLL sideloading. Delivering GuptiMiner via eScan updates In a report released today, cybersecurity company Avast says that the threat actor behind GuptiMiner had an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) position to hijack the normal virus definition update package and replace it with a malicious one named ‘updll62.dlz.’... Read more...

Airports Company South Africa (ACSA) this week revealed that Cape Town International Airport (CTIA) has achieved a ground-breaking milestone by processing more than 10 million passengers over a single financial year. This is the highest number of regional and international passengers processed since COVID-19... Read more...

DA MP says hours lost continue to result in persons being unable to collect their ID documents due to unmanageable queues The DA has been inundated with complaints that the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) systems are offline, resulting in long queues and delayed processing of documents. Through questions posed to the Minister, the DA can now reveal that the DHA has lost over 77 years’ worth of working hours due to system downtime and load-shedding from 2019 to date. Concerningly, this data only relates to hours lost for the application of smart IDs, meaning decades more of working hours could have been additionally lost in other spheres such as passport or visa applications.... Read more...

Home Affairs’ seemingly endless court battles set the department back more than R110-million between April 2023 and the end of February this year. This was revealed in a written parliamentary response by minister Aaron Motsoaledi. He said the department accumulated a litigation bill of R117 692 996.3, higher than the R72 637 944.51 spent the year before.... Read more...

Due to system downtime and load-shedding, the Department of Home Affairs (DHA) lost nearly 141,000 hours of Smart ID application and production time between the 2019/20 and 2022/23 financial years. Minister Aaron Motsoaledi revealed this figure in a recent response to questions raised in Parliament by Democratic Alliance MP Adrian Roos. Motsoaledi provided a breakdown of smart ID production and application hours lost to technical difficulties and load-shedding per province for each financial year from 2019/2020. These disruptions hit home Affairs offices in the Eastern Cape the hardest, with over 34,000 hours to rotational power cuts and system downtime. Mpumalanga offices lost the next-highest number of hours at 17... Read more...