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SA Hospital Reports Foreign Patients To Home Affairs - Report

4 years agoWed, 29 May 2019 00:13:06 GMT
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SA Hospital Reports Foreign Patients To Home Affairs - Report

A South African hospital, Robertson Hospital, is reportedly informing the country’s Home Affairs Ministry of foreign patients who would have overstayed their visas.

A 25-year-old Zibawen woman had her passport confiscated on 19 May after she went to the hospital seeking treatment.

Part of a report by a South African website, GroundUp reads as follows:

Chiedza* said that on the first day she sought treatment she was handed her hospital file without any questions. But when she returned for a follow-up she was asked to show her identification document.

The receptionist then told her that because her passport visa had expired she wasn’t going to get her file. Instead, the hospital would keep her passport for seven days while it contacted Home Affairs.

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On 22 May Chiedza received a call from the hospital to come and collect her passport. She went to the hospital the following day and was told to wait until her name was called.

A few minutes later she saw Home Affairs officials arriving, to whom she was introduced.

The Home Affairs officials asked her to fill in a couple of forms and then informed her that she had two weeks to seek money to buy a bus ticket to Zimbabwe.

They kept her passport and gave her one of the forms instead. They explained that once she had bought the bus ticket she could collect her passport from the hospital and then leave the country.

She picks lemons and naartjies on a Robertson farm. Buying a ticket back to Zimbabwe is not easy for her: she earns about R600 per week.

Chiedza said that the officials had a stack of about 20 passports with hers. She claimed that the confiscation of passports of immigrants mainly from Zimbabwe and Lesotho was common at Robertson hospital.

While an official at health department’s Cape Winelands District said that South Africa’s laws require that the department informs the Ministry of Home Affairs report cases of illegal persons seeking its services, a lawyer at Legal Resources Centre said that under the country’s laws, it is not necessary to verify the status or citizenship of someone to render a service.

The publication said that it could not reveal the woman’s true identity as she is still in South Africa illegally.

More: GroundUp

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