Parliament says the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is expected to brief the Home Affairs Portfolio Committee this week on the situation of refugees in Cape Town.
The City of Cape Town and South African Human Rights Commission are also expected to brief the committee.
This comes after a video revealed how supporters of the leader of refugees and asylum-seekers nationals Jean Pierre Balous reportedly pushed and shoved police officers and court officials in the Cape Town Magistrate’s Court where Balous was appearing on charges of assault.
The group was removed from Greenmarket square in February where they had been squatting since October 2019.
The refugees are demanding to be taken to another country.
Meanwhile the United Democratic Movement says current refugee crisis is not only a South African problem but a continental one which requires the intervention of the African Union.
United Democratic Movement UDM Chief Whip Nqabayomzi Kwankwa has called on the government to pressurise the African Union to help resolve the current refugees’ crisis in Cape Town.
“It’s an African problem, because people are afraid to go back to their countries, because the AU keeps on shielding despotic regimes in Africa without dealing with them or holding them to account.”
“And because people are afraid of going back to their own countries,-then that is made a problem of South Africa instead of it being debated and the resolutions being found at an AU level. South Africa must continue to pressure the AU to do something about this problem which continues to embarrass us internationally and to portray our country in a negative light.”
On this video below, The Western Cape High Court granted the City of Cape Town an interim order to remove foreign nationals living in the CBD:
