A Gauteng High Court (Johannesburg) judge ruled last week that the City of Johannesburg, the Gauteng and national Health Departments – as well as the police – must urgently ensure safe and unhindered physical access to public clinics, including Yeoville and Rosettenville Clinics in Johannesburg, for anyone seeking health services, reports Bhekisisa.
This complements a November ruling meant to stop xenophobic groups like Operation Dudula from blocking foreign nationals from entering government facilities, and denying them their constitutional right to healthcare.
The court has ordered the government and police to ensure safe and unhindered access to the two facilities, remove any unauthorised persons who prevents this, and to erect notices at all entrances warning that such people will be reported to the police.
On 25 November, Medecins Sans Frontieres and Kopanang Action Against Xenophobia had launched an application seeking an order to force the state to ensure safe access to health facilities, and to remove anyone trying to keep people out – but the vigilantes had ignored this.
“No court in South Africa will stop Operation Dudula,” the group’s Facebook post read. “They will have to arrest us all.”
Now, based on the High Court’s most recent ruling (4 December), the police may have to do just that.
SECTION27, acting for Medecins Sans Frontieres, Treatment Action Campaign and Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, had headed back to court because problems at particularly the Yeoville and Rosettenville clinics had continued.
Judge Stuart Wilson has now ordered the Yeoville and Rosettenville clinics, the City of Johannesburg, Gauteng and national Health Departments and police, to remove anyone hindering access to foreign nationals at the two clinics, make sure there are enough trained security personnel at all access points to ensure that the court’s order is carried out, and to, within five days of the court ruling, post notices at all entry points to the clinics warning that anyone defying this will be reported to SAPS.
The same institutions also have to report to the police all incidents and unauthorised people on the premises, and take “all reasonable steps” to identify them.
“Xenophobia is one of the greatest threats to democracy and human rights we presently face,” the judge warned in his ruling.
“Leaving aside the fact that it feeds on that most toxic of human instincts: the hatred of the others; forgetting that it is animated by the fantasy that the presence of foreign nationals in South Africa immiserates the lives of its citizens; and overlooking that, in its practiced form, it is merely another kind of racism … the problem with xenophobia is its misdirection.”
Sharon Ekambaram, head of the Refugees and Migrants Rights Project at Lawyers for Human Rights, likens the illegal demands for proof of citizenship – which includes the 4.4m South Africans over 16 without IDs – to the “dompas system under apartheid”.
Ekambaram, who has been an activist since the 1980s, told Mia Malan on Bhekisisa’s monthly TV programme, Health Beat, about what was driving the blockades and emboldening groups like Operation Dudula.
She said the asylum system was “in absolute crisis, and … contributing to institutionalised xenophobia, where it’s assumed that any foreign national coming from the African continent is lying about their reasons for coming to the country”.
“So people coming from the DRC, from Somalia, even people coming from Gaza, who cannot access the asylum system, remain undocumented and at risk of being arrested.”
She said for those coming from neighbouring countries, particularly Zimbabwe, it costs about R4 300 to get or renew a passport.
“People who come here are often working in the informal sector, and cannot afford that document (which would show their legal status in the country).
“The South African Government should be engaging with the Zimbabwean Government to discuss this. People have to have passports and they have to be stamped (by South African authorities) so they’re legal here.
“But we also know that there are more than 700 000 South Africans, who’ve had their IDs blocked or who are struggling to get IDs. So it’s just an arbitrary process of refusing people simply because they don’t have a document.”
She described the situation as “institutionalised xenophobia where healthcare workers and the administrative staff of hospitals and clinics have a prejudice against migrants”.
On having taken people like Limpopo Premier Phophi Ramathuba to the Health Professions Council of SA when she harshly rebuked a female Zimbabwean patient, which was circulated on social media, Ekambaram said: “Ramathuba is, first and foremost, a medical doctor, who has taken a Hippocratic oath about how she will conduct herself as a medical doctor. The HPCSA found she had broken that oath and was acting in a manner that contravened the behaviour of a doctor. She challenged that finding and it has been going on for two or three years because she (continuously) postpones the hearings when they sit down, and is never available.”
On how other leaders in the health field, and in the government, had influenced this behaviour, she added: “Health Minister Aaron Motsoaledi scapegoats migrants, making unsubstantiated statements that our public facilities are flooded by migrants. Do the maths. There’re about 3m foreign nationals in our country and we have a population of 65m people. It’s not plausible to have a tiny percentage ‘flood’ public hospitals.
“By scapegoating migrants, our attention is detracted from the corruption and mismanagement that is taking place, starting in Gauteng. Instead of talking about the migrants, we should be holding this government to account for addressing rampant corruption, in particular in the Health department.”
See more from MedicalBrief archives:
Second legal bid to get authorities to act against Dudula vigilantism
Court orders Operation Dudula to stop targeting migrants
Defiant Operation Dudula to appeal ruling
Interdict bid against Operation Dudula dismissed over lack of urgency