Home Affairs violating children's rights – judge

Home Affairs has been accused of violating human rights after refusing to grant citizenship to children born to undocumented mothers, but whose fathers are South African. The Star reports in a scathing judgment delivered in the Gauteng High Court (Pretoria), Acting Judge Moses Mphaga has ordered the department to ‘forthwith register the birth’ of a child (4) of a Johannesburg father and a Chinese female immigrant whose stay in the country became illegal. After his birth in 2013, Home Affairs officials told the parents that his birth would not be registered due to the mother’s illegal status. Mphaga found that the department relied on an ‘internal policy’ adopted in 2014 to block registration of children born out of such relationships. ‘The practical effect of this policy is to refuse the child the recognition as a South African citizen, to which he is entitled as a right,’ Mphaga wrote in the judgment. Mphaga said the policy contradicted a section of the Citizenship Act that grants automatic citizenship to children born in or outside the country of parents, one of whom is South African. ‘Accordingly… there can be no valid reason for the department to rely on an internal policy which effectively refuses to recognise the South African citizenship of the applicant’s child,’ he said.