A High Court ruling that former Rwandan General Kayumba Nyamwasa was entitled to refugee status in South Africa sends out a message that the country has become a safe haven for suspected international criminals.
This will be the argument presented by the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CoRMSA) when it applies for leave to appeal in the High Court in Pretoria against the ruling on Tuesday.
CoRMSA, assisted by the Southern Africa Litigation Centre, in 2011 launched an application to review a 2010 decision by South African authorities to grant refugee status to Nyamasa, despite requests by Rwanda, France and Spain for his extradition to face criminal charges including war crimes.
The case was argued in 2012 but Judge Nomonde Mngqibisa-Thusi only delivered a 16-page judgment two years later in October 2014. She ruled that Nyamwasa was entitled to refugee status, that CoRMSA failed to establish that there was reason to believe he was involved in the alleged crimes and said the authorities must have taken the allegations against him into consideration.
The Judge also ruled that the information disclosed in Nyamwasa’s asylum application was confidential and there was no reason to justify its disclosure to either CoRMSA or the court itself. CoRMSA contends in court papers Nyamwasa was ineligible for refugee status because there was reason to believe he had committed war crimes or crimes against humanity.
Nyamwasa has been recuperating in South Africa after surviving a suspected assassination attempt on him in 2010, when he was shot in the stomach.
CoRMSA maintains the issue before court was not if Nyamwasa should be returned to Rwanda, a country where he could be at risk of persecution, but whether the legal and procedural standards of the Refugees Act were properly applied.
CoRMSA is of the view that South Africa is obliged either to prosecute Numwasa for the crimes or to extradite him to a state that will do so. T
he organisation contends the court’s decision set a dangerous precedent that would effectively allow South Africa to use the confidentiality principle in refugee applications to shield the perpetrators of international crimes from accountability and its own controversial decisions from scrutiny.
“It is sending a signal to war criminals the world over that they will find a safe haven in South Africa, a haven where they might be actively protected as refugees,” it said.
UM– USEKE.RW
