Eight years of damning judgments about its treatment of immigrants have failed to make the Home Affairs Department mend its ways, the acting President of the SCA said on Friday in dismissing the department's latest attempt to defend its shortcomings.

According to a Sunday Times report, Judge Mahomed Navsa described its approach to a case involving hundreds of immigration applications and appeals as ‘unconscionable’ and ‘disgraceful’.

Navsa highlighted the case of Louise Batty, an Australian nurse whose 2015 application for a critical skills visa became a case of ‘immense hardship’. Batty reportedly told the Sunday Times she had ‘answered God's call’ in 2003 and set up an NGO in Limpopo which had since transformed the lives of 9,000 teenage girls by reducing the pregnancy rate from 13% to 0.07% and increasing the matric pass rate to 90%.

But the 58-year-old said she was reduced to despair when she appealed against Home Affairs' peremptory refusal of a critical skills visa. Her visa expired while she waited two and a half years for her appeal to be considered.

In the matter at hand, two immigration companies won an order from the Western Cape High Court in 2017 that compelled Home Affairs to process appeals and applications without ‘prolonged delays’. De Saude Attorneys and Visa One were then taken to the SCA by the Minister and DG of Home Affairs, who adopted what Navsa called a ‘baffling’ approach that was ‘deliberately obstructive and dilatory’, says the Sunday Times report.

De Saude and Visa One told the High Court judge who heard the original case, Rosheni Allie, that for years Home Affairs had failed to determine immigration applications in any ‘reasonable or lawful’ period.

‘Applications, even simple applications, to the department can take years to be resolved, if they are resolved at all,’ they said in court papers. Cape Town immigration attorney Stefanie de Saude said while she was relieved to have been vindicated, ‘I expect we'll be back in the same boat in a couple of months' time’ because Home Affairs did not have the capacity to comply with the court's instruction to improve its performance.

Full Sunday Times report (subscription needed)

DG Department of Home Affairs v De Saude Attorneys