Judge orders training for home affairs officials

THE Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration must design a training programme for its officials whose duties include the enforcement of the Immigration Control Act, Windhoek High Court judge Shafimana Ueitele has ordered.

The ministry’s permanent secretary and chief immigration officer must also design programmes that would help the ministry monitor the detention of alleged illegal immigrants in Namibia, and should have training programmes on the Immigration Control Act in place by no later than the end of September this year, judge Ueitele further ordered in a judgement delivered last Thursday.

In addition, judge Ueitele directed that nobody who has not been trained or is not conversant with the provisions of the Immigration Control Act be permitted to exercise any powers under the law after the end of November.

Judge Ueitele made the order at the end of a case in which Ombudsman John Walters sued the minister of home affairs and immigration, the home affairs ministry’s chief of immigration, the immigration tribunal, the minister of safety and security, the Inspector General of the Namibian Police, and the station commanders of the Windhoek, Katutura, Wanaheda and Seeis police stations over the illegal detention of nearly 50 people accused of being unlawfully in Namibia.

Walters lodged an urgent application about the detention of 46 alleged illegal immigrants in the Windhoek High Court in February last year. With the Ombudsman questioning the legality of the immigrants’ detention, who were held in custody in police cells in Windhoek and at Seeis, a government lawyer conceded that they were detained unlawfully, and judge Ueitele ordered their release in February last year.

Walters informed the court in an affidavit that investigators from his office discovered that the 46 detainees – most hailing from Angola, Zimbabwe, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Kenya – were being detained under warrants that were not signed, that no warrants authorising the detention of some of the detainees could be found, and that no warrants for the detention of several detainees had been issued after the 14-day detention period authorised by initial warrants had passed.

Walters also charged that immigration officials who had the 46 detained without the authorisation required by law, had no regard for the constitutional rights of the detainees, and appeared to be a law unto themselves.

In answering affidavits by two immigration officers, which were also filed in court, it was admitted that there was a lack of proper administration in the Directorate of Immigration and Border Control and that immigration officers were not able to keep track of all alleged illegal immigrants detained, because the directorate did not have a proper record-keeping system.

That revelation by the immigration officers was “a shocking exposure of the institutional incompetence” of the Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration, judge Ueitele commented in his judgement. That incompetence led to infringements of people’s constitutional rights, exposed Namibia’s government to claims for damages, and also put the national security of the country at risk, he said.

Judge Ueitele concluded that the unlawful detention of the 46 detainees was not motivated by malice on the part of individual immigration officials, but was the result of institutional failures in the Ministry of Home Affairs and Immigration. As a result of that finding, he decided not to order the immigration officials responsible for the detention of the 46 to pay the Ombudsman’s legal costs in the matter, but instead ordered the minister of home affairs and immigration and the other respondents to bear the Ombudsman’s legal costs.

Lawyers Yoleta Campbell and Norman Tjombe represented the Ombudsman in the matter. Government lawyer Sylvia Kahengombe represented the respondents.